By Aria Black, English ‘26, Fall 2024 Intern in Rare Books

In fall 2024, I was selected to spend my internship working with the Mahn Center’s Zines Collection. My supervisor is Dr. Miriam Intrator, who had also been my HTC tutorial instructor in spring of 2024, where we discussed what exactly went into being a special collections librarian. Dr. Intrator, during this tutorial, tasked me with researching and then proposing a viable solution for our zines, which were–at that point–still sitting in the boxes they arrived in. When I interviewed for the internship, I was able to talk about the proposal and my interest in fulfilling it.

My first few weeks were dedicated to familiarizing myself with the collection. This wasn’t a reorganization effort–I was starting completely from scratch. I went through the entire collection countless times, finding new zines that my eyes hadn’t snagged on before. During this time I was also reading Notes from Underground by Stephen Duncombe, one of the only books in wide circulation to discuss zines and alternative culture. I also attended and gave information on zines at an event hosted by the Mahn Center!

Initially, I wasn’t sure how I was going to get the entire collection organized digitally, let alone physically, but after a meeting with Manuscripts Archivist Greta Suiter–in which I was told I can organize the zines in a different way digitally (or intellectually) than physically–I started the process of organization.            

I began first with organizing within the boxes we already had, and pulling out duplicate zines where I found them. Eventually I ended up with a few different categories based on size: miniatures, general zines, oversize zines, and non traditional formats. Once I finished this lengthy organization process within the original boxes, it was time to begin boxing and foldering using proper archival materials. I did this for about two weeks straight, most of my time taken up with reading Notes from Underground, the occasional supplemental material, and the physical organization of the collection.

After I finished the physical organization of the collection, one of my friends asked to see some of the zines; when she made an appointment and came in, I realized as I was describing the collection that I was beginning to be an expert on the subject matter. It was weird and cool at the same time to recognize the depth of knowledge that I had developed on zines.

After this, it was time to work in ArchivesSpace (a website with descriptions of collections held by the Mahn Center). I had to import Library of Congress Name Authority Files (LCNAF). Authority files contain authoritative forms of subjects, places, and people’s names. They help to unify the description of books and collection materials within and across collections by linking to other materials having those same authority names and terms.

I chose to work in my own spreadsheet to streamline the process. Unfortunately, I lost the spreadsheet so I lost about 4 hours worth of work and had to restart, but bumps in the road notwithstanding, everything got imported and LCNAF were linked to each respective author (a very lengthy, time consuming process). Wrapping up my work on this collection felt rather anticlimactic; we made a bulk upload from a spreadsheet into ArchivesSpace, which became the publicly available and discoverable collection description, and then I was almost done. I spent a lot of time at the end of the semester doing detail work, combing for mistakes in the bulk upload to ArchivesSpace and double checking discoverability.

This experience has only confirmed that I want to do this for the rest of my life. I got so excited to have back-end access to archival software, and realized that I am capable and excited to do this work, to be a librarian. I can now put on my resume that I reorganized an entire collection for Ohio University, and that I have familiarity with the processes of how Special Collections works! The zines are now stored properly, they are far more findable than they were before, and hopefully my work this semester means that more people will use the Mahn Center for its Zines Collection (or any collection, really)! This was an incredibly useful and fun experience, and I’m sad that it’s over now.

To explore further:

• Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (2017)
• The Zines Collection

To request access to a particular zine, or to browse the entire collection, submit a research request form.