Classification Party

On Saturday we had our classification party, an attempt to sort the collection into a handful of very broad categories. We're re-shelving everything this afternoon so, from tomorrow, it should be ever so slightly easier to find the kind of zines you're interested in. The categories are (Currently - we're open to changing the system!):

- Perzines (Autobiographical zines)

- Arts and crafts, which includes illustration, comics, photography, film, graphic design, fine art - all visual arts, basically

- Activism, which includes LGBT, gender, politics, that kind of thing

- Food and the environment, which includes cooking, veganism, vegetarianism, gardening, eco stuff, fair trade, animals and travel as well

- Creative writing, which includes poetry and short stories

- Sports - all the football and rugby league zines we have

- Music

- Other - as you would expect, most of the zines in the collection don't fit into these categories so the 'other' section is understandably large

These categories aren't perfect or very precise, but we think they'll be a useful guide when browsing the shelves. Obviously we'd encourage you to look at absolutely everything, but we understand if you don't have a spare few days to read every zine in the collection!

Thanks to all the people who came to help us sort the zines into categories. Thanks to Stef Bradley for making the posters and to Cherry Styles for taking some lovely photos of everyone hard at work. Enjoy!

Classification Party

It has been scientifically proven that adding the word 'party' to anything automatically makes it sound more fun. So here we are attempting to make sorting things into a vaguely logical order sound exciting. On January 18th we have hired the little room at Nexus Art Cafe and we'd like people to come and help us organise the collection into a handful of very broad categories. We think this will help people to browse the shelves a little bit easier.

All the information is available on the Facebook event page. Please feel free to share the event with your pals! You don't have to commit or anything, you can just pop in for a few minutes if you happen to be in the area. There's sure to be some nice people to talk to about zines and whatever else you like talking about. And you can have a cup of tea and a slice of cake while you're at it. Check out the super cool poster below, as designed by the extremely talented Stef Bradley of Today Zine fame.

Whether you can come or not, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support since we took over the library in the summer. Hopefully 2014 will bring lots of exciting new developments for the library! Happy New Year!

Let's talk about classification

Hey! At some point in the near future we want to organise a 'classification party'. Basically, we'll get loads of people to come down to the library and help us sort the collection into broad genres or categories. It'll make it so much easier to find stuff! The plan is that there'll be some nice music and cake and cups of tea available and things like that.

Before that, though, it'd be really useful to get an idea of what genres/categories you all think would be appropriate. They have to be fairly broad, but not so broad that they're completely meaningless. Any ideas anyone?

- Sport
- Poetry
- Music (Maybe this needs to be divided into narrower categories?)
- Environment
- Politics
- LGBT
- Personal
- Compilation
- Photography
- Illustration
- Health
- Comics

Any other ideas would be appreciated! Feel free to tell me some of those aren't necessary too. Also, it'd be great if you could tell people you know who are interested in zines to join this group. Then we can have more people involved in the discussion/party and it'll be even more fun. Comments on this post and our Facebook, tweets to @SalfordZineLib, or emails to salford zine library at gmail dot come would be very gratefully received. And if the idea of a classification party sounds like fun to you, keep your eyes peeled for more info! I'll update the discussion as we go along at the bottom of this post.

 

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Update 7/10/2013: It's been suggested that there might be too many categories here. Do we think that we're better off with a less is more kind of approach? If so, what do you think the core categories are?