Of interest to some of the fans on my friends list

[andrewducker]

The National Library of Scotland is to embark on the laborious task of tracking down and cataloguing the countless thousands of fanzines published in the UK over the past 70 years.

From

Comments

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

First I knew of it. Says it all, really. Press releases going out before the staff are told seems to be the way things go these days.

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I knew people who worked at US Embassies who got their info more quickly from the State Department website than from direct communication....

FYI for anyone interested: that public lecture he's giving on 9 March is at Napier Edinburgh Napier:

http://staff.napier.ac.uk/News/ProfessorialLecture

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I contacted Professor Atton - there isn't a project; they're still in the funding proposal stages. Which is why you haven't been told about a project!

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

Yep, I found that out yesterday too! Turns out the entire thing is still meant to be hush-hush...oopsy. *facepalm*

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Do you have a link?

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

There is a link in the original post.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7908705.stm

[andrewducker]

Not further than the BBC article I'm afraid. Shouldn't be hard to track down Professor Atton though.

Fanzine project information

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I contacted Professor Atton (I'm mostly unemployed...) and he says that there *is* no project - there is a project *proposal*, and they should know in April whether there is any funding for it.

The real story was the lecture he's giving (which is buried down at the end), but obviously that isn't snazzy enough for Auntie Beeb!

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

What a frakking waste of time and money.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I'd say the very point of a library was to preserve and make available the knowledge and media produced by its culture. This seems to me to be an important part of that.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

Maybe I've just published in a few too many fanzines I'd prefer dropped off the face of the planet forever.

[andrewducker]

Well that's entirely understandable.

You can find usenet postings by me from 1992 - I don't think I'd like to stand by all of my opinions from the time :->

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

The other thing is, this is a publically funded body and it annoys me to think of public monies (esp in a time of fiscal crisis) going to preserve this kind of stuff instead of going toward educating the public, esp. when so much fan produced material is available to everyone, online, for free.

[andrewducker]

Lots of this stuff is now old and falling apart - it's scarce, and it's a record of the work being produced outside of the mainstream press of the 60s, 70s and 80s. I'd say it was incredibly important if you wanted to actually understand the music scene of the time.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

Ahhh. See, for music it does make more sense to me, because there's a much narrower field of published titles available than can accomodate all musicians, and the zine stuff could be a great indicator of bands that later made it huge and where they started out.

I, of course, hear FANDOM and think Sci-Fi fanfic. Then my insides go a bit green and try to escape from my mouth.

[andrewducker]

Aaah. SF Fandom started off very much with fan-made magazines _about_ SF, not fanfic. Fanfic, so far as I can tell, was a very minor part of fandom until the internet came along.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

And thank goodness for that.

(God, I sound very down on fanfic for someone who made a name for herself in her fandoms of choice by writing it in the early nineties)

[pisica.livejournal.com]

I e-mailed the professor; they're still applying for funding. He didn't specify where thay might be coming from, but it almost certainly wouldn't be coming from the NLS itself.

It might still be funded from a public body, admittedly, in which case your objection would stand (though I don't agree with it, given the very small amount of funding available to these sorts of projects).

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

Thing is, national libraries like ourselves have a duty to the nation to preserve publications and make them available for research purposes, no matter what the material is. The British Library is exactly the same. Although we have a collections policy most of the material that comes to us is brought in via legal deposit or is donated. Could be that 100 years down the line someone wants to do research on these fanzines (not so far fetched, as we have a number of researchers and PG students doing that very thing right now!) and the websites may have expired - where do they find the information then? At least print is a preservable format at present. Websites are unreliable for preservation of material at the best of times. :/

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

That pretty much sums up our corporate mission statement, Andy. :)

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Dear gods I must be getting old if BBC news articles feel the need to explain what a flexi-disc is.

[andrewducker]

They stopped being produced 9 years ago.

Would this be a good time to point out that I've never owned a record player...

[awdrey-gore.livejournal.com]

Wow. I would love to be involved in a project like that.

[nuttyxander.livejournal.com]

Interesting, but will they scan them as well?

[ishkhara.livejournal.com]

Probably. Especially if they're fragile.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

I hope this will extend to film fanzines and not just music ones.