Library Zine Cart

Zine-making promotes "participatory learning, validation of personal experience, and the development of critical-thinking skills" (Potter and Sellie, 2016, p. 118).

Robin Potter and Alycia Sellie, “Zines in the Classroom: Critical Librarianship and Participatory Collections” in Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook, Volume Two: Lesson Plans, Chicago, IL: Association of College and Research Libraries, 2016. 

Ready to teach with the Library Zine Cart? Please fill out our online request form, and a Library staff member will contact you.

• Highly customizable as an in-class activity or assignment
• Scalable according to available class time (from 50 to 270 minutes)
• Possible as an individual or a collective end product
• Rewarding not only in production but also in subsequent discussion and exchange

Learning objectives* may include the following:

• Conceptualize zines and situate them in their cultural, social, and/or historical contexts
• Find and access zines while thinking critically about libraries as repositories
• Analyze and evaluate zines as forms of both verbal and visual communication
• Design and create a zine following ethical and legal best practices

*Adapted from the ACRL Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and the ACRL-RBMS and SAA Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy.

Zines can be the subject and/or the output of a lesson plan. And a zine-making activity or assignment can be completely standalone (e.g., a response to a course reading or a self-reflection prompt) or put into conversation with PUL collections. 

Please stay tuned for more details!

• Researching Zines: Introduction to PUL Zine Collections
• Share Your Research: Make a Zine about Your Object/Project
• Whose Voices? Zines and Personalized Histories
• Zines & Small Presses & Self-Publishing, Oh My!
• Content and Form: Analyzing Zines as Text and Image
• Can I Copy This? Zines and Copyright
• Imposition: Zines and Printing History