RDA and the Description of Zines: Metadata Needs for Alternative Publications

Abstract

Comparison of zine user needs, known problems in zine description, and established best practices to Resource Description and Access (RDA) reveals RDA's applicability for describing alternative publications in library and nonlibrary contexts. Findings are that RDA is appropriate for describing alternative publications, though expansion and improvement is warranted in documenting makers, addressing intellectual property, approaching privacy concerns, facilitating subject and genre analysis, undertaking object cataloging, applying companion standards and external vocabularies, and using RDA where boundaries between work, expression, and manifestation are blurred. Experiments in the MARC and ZineCore formats suggest that a Linked Data model would aid RDA implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• cataloging
• RDA
• special collections
• zines

Notes

¹This article differentiates between “libraries” and “zine libraries,” and respectively, “librarians” and “zine librarians” along the boundary of professionalized versus independent.