Zine Thesaurus History
2008 - The Zine Subject Thesaurus was born when Amanda Stevens and Zachary Howarth-Schueler made an online catalogue for the Anchor Archive Zine Library using open source content management system Drupal (version 5), as a directed studies project while doing their Master of Library and Information Studies degrees at Dalhousie University.
Amanda and Zac decided to create a custom subject thesaurus for cataloguing zines because they believed standard subject thesauri used by libraries (such as Library of Congress Subject Headings) were outdated and overly complex and did not adequately describe the topics covered by zines.
Subject terms were added to the Zine Subject Thesaurus as Amanda, Zac, and many volunteers catalogued zines in the Anchor Archive Zine Library, and then Amanda would create full thesaurus term records for them in a separate open source thesaurus management tool called THEW32 (developed by Timothy C. Craven). A separate tool was used for managing the Thesaurus because Drupal's taxonomy functionality was limited. Amanda periodically generated a PDF in THEW32 and uploaded it to the Anchor Archive website so others could use the Thesaurus.
2008-2012 - The Thesaurus continued to be developed as approximately 70% of the Anchor Archive's zine collection of over 5000 zines was catalogued by various volunteers and student employees and interns involved with the Anchor Archive. Other zine libraries and collections around the world discovered the Zine Subject Thesaurus and started to use it.
2015 - The first version of the Zine Thesaurus in THEW32 received its last update and the last PDF file was published on the Anchor Archive website. Ongoing updates had become too much for one person to manage and it was a time of multiple moves and instability for the zine library.
2018 - The Anchor Archive rebuilt and migrated its catalogue and website to Drupal version 8. All of the subject terms in the Zine Thesaurus were migrated with the rest of the data, but the full term records and thesaurus structure were still in THEW32, which was no longer being developed.
Seeking guidance on the future of the subject thesaurus and hoping it could move to a model of collective management and development, Amanda surveyed the zine library community about the Zine Subject Thesaurus. We learned that it was widely used for cataloging zines and other items when an alternative subject thesaurus was needed, the structure and term relationships were useful for selecting terms and navigating the Thesaurus, and people in the community wanted to help update and maintain the Thesaurus.
2019-2020 - Amanda gathered a group of zine librarians (which included Elissah Becknell, Violet Fox, Angel Chirnside, Jenna Freedman, and Jakob Roberts) that used the Thesaurus to review and evaluate thesaurus software tools, to find an alternative to THEW32. They decided to manage the Zine Thesaurus within the Anchor Archive's Drupal catalogue since the new version of Drupal had improved taxonomy management features and additional custom features could be developed to give all the thesaurus management functionality needed.
2021 - Amanda Stevens contracted the Drupal development collective Netuxo to do custom development work on the Anchor Archive website that allowed thesaurus term relationships to be created reciprocally and improved the function of parent-child / broader-narrower term relationships in Drupal. The work was released under an open source license.
2021-2022 - A group of zine librarians (which included Kelly Swickard, Elissah Becknell, Violet Fox, Jenna Freedman, and Rhonda Kauffman) worked for 2 years at virtual bi-weekly "editathons" to review and update the entire Zine Subject Thesaurus - recreating term records in Drupal from THEW32, creating full term records for new subject terms that had been added by Anchor Archive cataloguers since the last Thesaurus update, and adding new terms as needed.
2023 - Drupal developer Ippy Gray (former member of Netuxo) designed a new searching and browsing interface for the Zine Thesaurus and improved the display of terms on the Anchor Archive website.
The Zine Thesaurus began collaborating with the ZineCat union catalogue for zines project. Amanda presented on the Thesaurus with Lauren Kehoe of ZineCat at the Art Libraries Society of North America conference in Mexico City.
The Thesaurus applied for and received a MARC code that can be used by cataloguers to indicate the source of a subject term added to a MARC catalogue record.
2024 - The Zine Thesaurus Management Collective was formed from members of the Zine Thesaurus user community to lead ongoing and future management and development of the Zine Thesaurus.
Forms were added to the website to suggest new subject terms and give feedback on term records, to facilitate communication with and input from users of the Zine Subject Thesaurus.
Zine Thesaurus virtual Editathons resumed to continue creating term records for new subject terms added by Anchor Archive cataloguers and add new terms suggested by the Thesaurus user community.
2025 - The Zine Thesaurus Management Collective began developing a separate Genre Thesaurus for zines, as they received feedback that this was needed by the community and they realized the Subject Thesaurus included many genre terms.