University of Iowa: “10,000 Zines and Counting: a Library’s Quest to Save the History of Fandom”

Note: The article includes a link to coverage of the project from Library Journal that was published a couple of months ago.
infoDOCKET first posted about the U. of Iowa project in November 2014.
From The Verge:

The University of Iowa is home to almost a century of fandom history. Its library’s special collections house everything from 1920s “dime novel” reviews to T-shirts that were auctioned off in protest of the 2002 Farscape cancellation. In 2012, though, it acquired one of the most valuable resources yet: the library of James “Rusty” Hevelin, a lifelong science fiction superfan and prolific collector of books and fanzines dating back to the 1930s. Last year, the Hevelin Collection was chosen as the first target of the university’s Fan Culture Preservation Project, a massive effort to digitize some of the most vulnerable and ephemeral pieces of science fiction history. Now, that effort is starting to take shape.
In July, UI digital project librarian Laura Hampton officially began the long process of archiving the Hevelin Collection. The library is partnering with the fan-run Organization for Transformative Works to collect more zines for eventual digital archival, but Hampton is currently focused on material from the 1930s to 1950s, spanning the rise of zines and the Golden Age of science fiction. The vast majority of the images will stay offline, but an accompanying Tumblr has given outsiders a peek into the roughly 10,000 zines that Hevelin donated — and into the communities that helped create science fiction as we know it, from fandom clashes to fan fiction.

Read the Complete Article (approx. 1400 words)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Libraries, News, Preservation