Note: This is a guest post by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Duke University Libraries. Kelly is curator of the Bingham Center Zine Collections.

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has a collection of over 4,000 zines written by women and girls from the early 1990s to the present. So far we have about 2,600 of these issues cataloged in a metadata-only database. At first glance, the zines look like perfect candidates for full-scale digitization. They are frequently used by researchers from around the United States and beyond, have great visual appeal, and often are the only copies to be held in an archives. Digitizing would help preserve zines from heavy use and promote broader access to unique material in a popular collection.

When you take a closer look, digitizing zines becomes a lot more complicated…

Permission- Before posting anything online, the first step is often getting permission from the creator. The authors of zines usually no longer live at the address included in their zine, if they give a name or address at all. Even email isn’t a reliable way to contact people since many zines were created in the pre-internet era, or include old addresses no longer in use.

Copyright- Some zine archives claim that publishing PDF scans of zines online falls under “fair use” for nonprofit educational purposes, and because they usually aren’t hindering anyone’s ability to profit from the publication. To further complicate this question, most zines cut, paste, reprint, borrow, steal, and repurpose images and text from other publications, with or without attribution. According to the Copyright Office: “The distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”

Privacy- Even though zines are “published” rather than private, like a letter or diary, we have no idea whether 10 copies were made for close friends or 1,000 copies were made and sent far and wide through a zine distributor. They are most often written by young women who never imagined that their deepest secrets and angsty rants would be archived in a research library. One could argue that other digital projects that post diaries and letters of historical significance also violate this right to privacy, but the now-adult women who created these zines are likely to be living, active Internet users whose personal and professional lives could be negatively (or positively) affected by someone else finding their zine online. For example, we have been contacted to remove a last name from our database that was associated with a zine title that the author felt damaged her reputation in her current career—at age 16, she had no idea that the flippant title would ever be available online.

Print culture- This argument for maintaining the print and material nature of zines as opposed to creating digital surrogates is perhaps the weakest of these 4 factors, but it is still a point to consider. Zines are created by hand, crafted with paper, scissors, tape, glue, staples. They were meant to be handed from person to person, physically shared. The experience of handling zines in person, turning each page to reveal intimate secrets, funny comics, and poetry, can’t be duplicated on-line. You would get the content, but miss out on the physical experience, an aspect that is even more important as the medium of communication has shifted to the electronic.

I could write a few more reasons why we are not digitizing our zine collection, just as I could write as many more about why we perhaps should digitize them. Instead I’d rather hear what others have to say on the subject.

There are many steps involved in creating and publishing a new digital collection — it’s truly a team effort that requires a lot of hard work and coordination of efforts from people across the libraries, with many different skill sets, working in many different departments, in buildings across Duke’s campus.  People who aren’t familiar with the process often think that digitizing the materials is the most time-consuming part, and that once that’s done, the collection is ready to go.  The truth, though, is that our colleagues in the Digital Production Center, who do the digitizing, are so fast and wildly productive on their scanners and cameras that the rest of us are constantly trying to catch up with them.

One of the most time-consuming parts of the digital collections process, and the part that people often don’t think about, is creating the metadata.   Metadata is data about the materials we’ve digitized, and as part of the metadata process, we have to decide how to arrange the items in the digital collection, how to describe them, what information we need to collect about them, what kind of terminology to use so people can find them, and all sorts of other things.  We have to decide how we want users to be able to find and interact with the digital objects, and what metadata is necessary to make that possible.

To make things even trickier, not only is metadata perhaps the most time-consuming part of the process, but up until this point we’ve had only a small number of staff working on it.  Part of the problem has been that we haven’t had a good metadata creation/management tool, so the workflows and procedures we’ve concocted to get around that have been so unwieldy that it just didn’t make sense to throw tons of staff at them.  But now that our new metadata editor Trident is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality, we can finally think about bringing nearly all our catalogers and archivists into the metadata process, which has been our goal all along.  In early May, we brought two trainers in to teach a two-day metadata course for about 20 of our catalogers, archivists, and other staff to prepare them to do this work.  We’ll soon be putting a subset of that group to work on the huge Broadsides project we’ve been talking about elsewhere on this blog, and then once we really get going, we’ll bring even more of them into this project and others.

Our goal is that digital collections work will become just one of the many things our catalogers and archivists do as a regular part of their jobs.  These folks are already experts at describing, arranging, and providing access to the library’s collections, so now they’ll be applying that expertise to new types of materials.  Even if they only work on digital collections as a small part of their jobs, bringing all these new staff members into the process will allow us to create metadata — and therefore create digital collections — much faster than we ever have before.  And that means more images, more text, more audio, more video … more ideas and discoveries will be possible for users around the world than ever before.  The best is yet to come ….

There are great images of children in many of our digital collections, including the Michael Francis Blake Photographs, the Sidney D. Gamble Photographs, and Ad*Access.  We’ll soon be adding to this list with a new collection, Images of Mainline Protestant Children and Families in the U.S. This collection, coming out of the Duke Divinity School Library, will consist of photos from American magazines of the mid-20th century, depicting what children and families in the U.S. looked like — or, often, idealized versions of what the creators thought they should look like.

As we build our digital collections, we keep in mind how they work as individual collections as well as how they work together.  By using consistent metadata across collections and developing ways to display and let users interact with objects from many sources, we try to provide seamless access across collections and create opportunities for interdisciplinary research and interesting discoveries.  A search on a term like “children” will bring back images, texts, audio, and video from around the world, various historical periods, and all kinds of social contexts — give it a try and see what you find.

Continuing the introductions … I’m Rich Murray, and I’m one of two Metadata Librarians in the Digital Collections Program. I’m based in the Cataloging & Metadata Services Department, and I work with Noah Huffman (in the Rare Book, Manuscript, & Special Collections Library) to plan and create metadata for our digital collections.

What does that mean, exactly? Basically, Noah and I –- and the rest of the metadata team –- work to describe, organize, and allow users to discover the cool stuff in our digital collections. Metadata is “data about data,” and without it, a 5000-item digital collection is like 5000 photographs thrown into a big pile. You might be able to find what you want by going through them all one at a time, but it will probably take forever, and you may get to the end and discover that what you were looking for wasn’t in the big pile anyway.

With good metadata, though, you can find what you’re looking for much more efficiently and painlessly. We group objects into categories based on subject, format, time period, or anything else that makes sense. We apply captions to images, keywords to advertisements, plot summaries to videos, and anything else we think will help you find what you’re looking for. And if we’re doing our job right, the metadata we provide might even lead you to really, really cool stuff that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Fortunately, Noah and I don’t have to do all this on our own. We work with a great group of folks, including the rest of the Digital Collections Implementation Team, the Metadata Advisory Group, and other staff throughout the libraries. It’s a team effort, and as our Digital Collections Program grows, more and more of us are involved in making it happen.

The other part of my job, which may sound completely unrelated at first but really isn’t, is serving as the Catalog Librarian for Spanish & Portuguese (and Catalan and Galician) Languages. Both parts of my job involve describing, arranging, and providing access to the library’s collections so you can find what you need.

Metadata isn’t something new –- it’s what librarians and archivists have been doing all along, even if we called it something else. Connecting people and ideas is what do best, and as part of the Digital Collections Program, I get to spend my days bringing some truly remarkable resources to an audience around the world. It doesn’t get much better than that.