Scholars’ Lab is active in zine research, making, and distribution. Amanda Wyatt Visconti maintain a collection of zines by authors and on topics of interest to the Lab and its community, including zines on feminist approaches to technology, digital scholarship tutorials, creativity and making, and social justice advocacy.

The project includes:

• Copies of print zines distributed in SLab’s Common Room public space
• A digital catalogue of zines, combining the zines we can distribute publicly with others we cannot distribute for various reasons (including only having a single non-reproducable copy in our collection, or zines purchased with staff personal funds).
• A subset of zine titles and metadata in the catalogue is available via a public interface: SLab’s public zine catalogue view
• Interest in helping UVA groups and local groups (especially student groups doing work in line with our zine collecting areas) print, distribute, and/or archive their zines
• Availability to consult on zine research and teaching uses

Timeline

• The project began pre-pandemic as a “Zine Wall” in a semi-public space that offered free copies of interesting zines as we happened upon them, and via cross-Library working group meetings and a Slack channel.
• The zine project was virtual-only during the renovation of SLab’s physical space in the Main Library (2020-2023).
• In 2024, zines will return to our public space in the renovated Shannon Library (SLab Common Room, Shannon 308).

Policy

We welcome visitors to leave zines in our Common Room (Shannon 308) that they’d like us to distribute there, and/or include a copy in our non-public zine backup archive; you are also welcome to email us digital versions of zines. We reserve the right to remove and recycle any zines left in our public space for any reason, or to decline to print zine copies or include a zine in our catalogue. This includes if we find zines too unrelated to or antithetical to our values or work. If you have zines you’d like to share but are uncertain whether they’ll fit our policy, you can email Amanda Wyatt Visconti to check.