The award will fund a planning meeting for the Zine Union Catalog, a one-stop search for zines in libraries all over the world. The catalog's prototype was built by Director of the Barnard Zine Library Jenna Freedman and NYU's Accessibility and Accommodations Librarian Lauren Kehoe for their joint capstone project as part of their Masters' degrees in Digital Humanities from the CUNY Graduate Center.
The planning meeting will take place at Barnard in the summer of 2024 and will establish horizontal, racial and social justice-informed decision-making guidelines for participating zine librarians and archivists from all types of institutions: community organizations, academic and research libraries and archives, public libraries, school libraries, and any other zine-holding institution that wants to add its items to the shared catalog. Zine librarians from the US, Canada, and the UK will participate in the planning meeting, which will be facilitated by Sara Yukimoto-Saltman, who leads meetings with social and racial-justice inflected compassion and rigor. The $30,000 will fund the facilitation, as well as travel and accommodations for the participants.