ZAM Conference 2025 – The Zine Subject Thesaurus
Amanda Stevens
The following is an edited transcript of a presentation by Amanda Stevens, of the Halifax Anchor Archive Zine Library, on their Zine Subject Thesaurus. This talk, delivered on November 12, 2025, was part of the Zine Archives Montreal conference, organized by ARCMTL during the week of Expozine.
The Zine Subject Thesaurus is a set of subject terms for cataloguing zines that provides zine libraries, archives, and collections with an alternative to traditionally used controlled vocabularies. The need for accurate description of radical materials drives the development of the Thesaurus, ensuring the respectful treatment of works by marginalized creators. Stevens shared the background of the Thesaurus and discussed the collaborative work that strives to keep the Thesaurus up-to-date.
Amanda Stevens: Today, on behalf of me and my colleague and friend Violet Fox, who couldn’t be here, I’m going to talk about the zine subject thesaurus, what it is, how it came to be, and how you can use it. I have been volunteering at the Anchor Archive zine library for almost 20 years. I do library information management, consulting work, and book indexing. And I make zines!
The Anchor Archive opened in 2005. It started out as a library in someone’s house and now it’s part of a DIY arts and music space called RadStorm. We have a zine collection of over 7,000 zines on all kinds of topics. We also sell zines, have zine-making workshops, and we used to organize a zine fair, which ended during the pandemic (hopefully we’ll start it again). We lend out our zines. And we’re entirely volunteer run.
In 2008, we made our own online catalogue and circulation system, using the open-source software program, Drupal. We have a database of the zine catalogue and have a special circulation module for lending out zines. The catalogue has a core set of metadata fields, which are applicable to zines. We wanted to develop a system that would be easy for volunteers to use, but have all of the important information that we might need about zines: author, location, language.
And then we decided to have a field for subjects, so that we could tag everything with multiple keywords to make it easier for people to find zines about certain topics. We decided to use a controlled vocabulary or an established list of subject terms to choose from. We did that to improve the effectiveness of searching, because some zine catalogs choose to have more of a free tagging system. The Queer Zine Archive Project, for example, does not use a controlled vocabulary because they want to maintain the diversity of terminology that people might use in different communities and over different periods of time to refer to topics. But that can reduce the accuracy of searching and make it harder to find all zines about a particular topic if they’re tagged in different ways.
So, when we decided that we wanted to use a controlled vocabulary, we looked at what terms are used by more standard libraries, like Library of Congress Subject Headings, and we looked at some other more specialized vocabularies. There wasn’t really anything that we thought would be simple enough for volunteers to use, and for people who would be using the catalogue to search for zines. We wanted the terminology to be accessible and natural language, that would cover the topics that are included in zines, and be up to date and non-offensive—which unfortunately, Library of Congress Subject Headings sometimes are not, because the vocabulary has been around for so long and it’s controlled or updated by institutions that can be very slow. Although there are people who are actively working to change the subject headings.
We decided to make our own thesaurus based on zine community values. So, I was wondering if we could have a little brainstorm session about what you think are the values of the zine community, or what comes to mind when you think about zine makers and zine communities. What’s important to us?
Audience: Inclusivity. Independence. DIY. Freedom. Non-commercial. Social justice. Community. Self-expression. Marginalized voices.
AS: Yes. We also have: anti-authority, anti-oppression, and creativity.
This is the Zine Librarians Code of Ethics, which is a zine about how to run a zine library or manage a zine collection in ways that are true to the ethics or values of the zine community. We wanted to reflect those values in the zine thesaurus in a few different ways: the language that we choose and the terminology that we use. Making sure that the terminology is words that people would use to search for things, or the words that zine makers would use in their own zines. Terminology that is up to date and inclusive, and that, of course, is changing all the time. So, we’re always updating the thesaurus. And we’re very open to community feedback.
The Zine Librarians Code of Ethics
We made the thesaurus in 2007. We manage it collectively, as a group, and then get input from different people. It was basically created as we were cataloging the Anchor Archive zines, so all the terms in it have come from those zines and we continue to add to the thesaurus as we catalogue zines. And then we take suggestions from community members of terms that can be added. About 1900 terms now.
They’re post-coordinated, which is a librarian term—for example, the Library of Congress Subject Headings can be really long and complex, “Women’s Literature—18th century,” and then all these dashes and different things. But our terms instead are simpler and you can combine them to represent different topics.
The project as a whole is managed by a volunteer collective. We have monthly edit-a-thons, that anybody can come to. You just have to get some simple training if you want to contribute to the thesaurus. We meet online and we review all the new terms that have been added by volunteer catalogers, and decide if they’re good or if they need to be changed. And then we create full term records.
Here’s the term for “Cooking.” Each term record could have “used for” or “synonyms,” other words that mean similar things. They could have a “broader term” or a “narrower term.” It’s like a parent-child term, although we don’t tend to use very many of those in the thesaurus. The thesaurus is not very hierarchical, which is keeping in line with zine community values. We find that putting things in a hierarchy can sometimes impose meaning on something. We have a lot more “related-term” relationships. So, if you’re cataloging a zine about cooking, you can look at the related terms to get ideas of other terms that you might want to use, like “aprons.” And then you could also click on the term record and it will also show you zines in the Anchor Archive catalogue that have this term.
And we have a MARC code if anybody uses the MARC format of cataloging.
To explain a little bit more about the lack of hierarchy—we do use “Queer” in the source as an umbrella term instead of a word like “LGBTQIA+2S”. However, all of the other terms that could describe sex, different types of sexual orientations, or identities or practices like “gay,” “bisexual,” “asexual,” “lesbian,” we don’t have them as narrower terms of “queer” because we think that would impose meaning on those terms, or people who might identify in any of those ways. Because we don’t necessarily want to assume that someone who is bisexual also identifies as queer. Instead, we like to use the “related term” relationship.
Louis Rastelli (ARCMTL): Do you ever have issues where a zine categorizes itself or self describes itself, but you decide to maybe have different terms related?
AS: I guess it just depends what terminology the zine uses. Like we do try to follow the terminology used by the zines or zine makers, but we also have to keep things coordinated in some way.
So, if a zine used a term that was too specific for the thesaurus, a ‘non-preferred’ term, then we would choose a different term for the catalog instead. But we do have a summary field in every zine record, where we can add in other terminology that’s more specific or that we don’t want as a subject term but we still want to be in the catalog record and retrievable.
John Latour (Concordia Webster Library): Do you have a limit to how many terms you put in?
AS: I can’t remember actually if there’s a limit in the software itself, but when we’re giving directions to catalogers, we usually say “Add up to 10 terms.” An average would maybe be three to five.
Although sometimes the zine isn’t about anything that you would add as a subject term, and that’s okay. And sometimes zines cover like 13, 15 subjects. So, I don’t think we have a hard limit, but you don’t want to go too overboard.
We could do some practice searching in the thesaurus. What would be a term that you might choose for this zine about seed bombs?
Audience: Gardening.
AS: Gardening. Yes. Oh, but there’s “Container gardening,” “Regular gardening,” “Guerilla gardening.” I think Violet specifically put this exercise in there to show that we have the term “Guerilla gardening” and Library of Congress Subject Headings does not.
The next one is a zine about farts. And you might be surprised to know that we have the term “Farts” in our thesaurus, whereas Library of Congress has “Flatulence.” So how many zines have farts? That’s a good question. Let’s see. One. Called “Pee + Poop + Farts.”
Another term that we have in the Zine Thesaurus is “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” which is a very important topic in Canada, but is not present in Library of Congress Subject Headings. And there’s more than one zine about missing and murdered Indigenous women.
I think I already mentioned this, but if you do want to contribute to the thesaurus, you can; there’s a form on our website where you can suggest a term.
If you’re using it, and you’re cataloging and you find a term that’s missing, you can send it to us, because it is not comprehensive. We are continuing to develop with the source as we go, so we really value people’s suggestions. If there’s a term that you disagree with, or you think we missed something, we have a feedback form as well that you can use. Some of the things that we’re planning to do is make the thesaurus available in linked data format. We want it to be possible to export the whole thesaurus or part of it or like an updated list of terms, or download it if you were using it in a separate system. And also improve integrations with other catalogues, in particular with ZineCat, which is a zine union catalog project that is under development, but it’s going to be a collection of zine records from many different libraries that you could access to if you’re doing copy cataloging or just wanted to find out where you could get copies of zines at different libraries.
We’re developing a second thesaurus of genre terms, as I mentioned, and then in the future we would like the zine thesaurus to be multilingual. Some people are already using it in French and Spanish, but we don’t really have the technical capability yet in our website to have it available in different languages. So, I think it’s just a matter of applying for a grant and making that happen.
