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The Perfect Ending

 

Some folks from my workshop showing off their zines!

The first day of my practicum in January was a blizzard and my last day today it's 80 degrees. I couldn't have asked for a sunnier mood to conclude my practicum experience. I led a zine workshop in the room next to the archive. I talked about what zines are (self-published or independently published periodicals), their legacy, and my history with them (as a publisher, distributor and former bookstore manager that sold them). And because it was Library Week, we talked about zines in libraries and archives. Then we jumped in! I led everybody into a writing exercise, and I also showed how to fold and cut a piece of paper into 8 pages. Then everybody transferred their content to their zines, and we shared them. People made great stuff as they always do when I do this workshop. It's so fun to see people going from knowing very little about an art form and then straight into being makers. The power of accessible DIY! Then we talked about making zines that are saddle-stitched (that just means they're stapled in the middle), and how those are booklets that need to be paginated in multiples of 4 (since there's 4 pages per piece of paper). It was the perfect way to spend an hour. It wasn't until we were done and some folks left that we decided to take a picture. I was glad someone thought of that. 


When I walked into the CSU library I saw the poster with a picture of me at the entrance. Neato!

One of my favorite last things Kheir and I did right before the workshop today was watch a VHS tape that I found in the unprocessed parts of the archive (which we had to rewind first, of course):


It had an ABC news segment from 2004 about Kanye "College Dropout" West's rise and Chicago. More importantly, it featured his (late) mom, who was a professor at CSU. That seemed like a poetically hilarious way to end my practicum.

With a news segment about someone who dropped out of CSU.


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Today's standards fulfilled as per the Society of American Archivists Curriculum:

A. CORE ARCHIVAL KNOWLEDGE, 1. Knowledge of Archival Material and Functions, f) Outreach, Instruction, and Advocacy (p. 6)

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