Skip to main content

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.


--

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)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sleuthing Pays Off

Kheir greeted me today with a nice surprise -- 9 or so boxes of material pertaining to the Brown v. Board of Ed 50th Anniversary Commission files, all of which are housed at CSU! I didn't even know there was an entire collection that was specifically about the anniversary (the anniversary being in 2004, when CSU held the reenactment with Charles Freeman playing the role of the judge in the case). So I spent a large part of the day scouring those files to find anything with his name on it to prove a CSU connection, which would be a great addition to the Justice Freeman exhibit. Boy am I glad Kheir had previously told me to scour T he Chicago Defender back issue archive a few weeks back (accessed through CPL) to see if there was anything written about Freeman and CSU. And to think that CSU had the whole collection about that anniversary commission (and that there even was a commission)! In those files I found a physical copy of that Defender article that featured a picture of Just...
2 comments
Read more

Notes and Plans!

Today is one of my last days in the archive, because the semester is ending soon! Today Kheir and I talked about the evaluation letter he has to write, as well as what the next couple weeks will look like for me. Next week I'll be doing the zine workshop as part of Library Week at the archive (info about that here) , and then the week after that Kheir will be out of town. So for all practical purposes, this is my last day to actually actively work on things in the archive, and specifically with the Lerone Bennett Jr. collection I was working on. So what I did was organize all my notes to pass them along to Kheir to help with fleshing out descriptions with the finding aid. He mentioned that it would be helpful to have more description about what the archive holds, so I rewrote the pre-existing bio and added some of the highlights of the things I found. That way there's some good selling points to entice people to come look at the archive. I guess I'm kind of proud of what I ...
2 comments
Read more