State Library of Victoria Zine Collection

The State Library of Victoria has the largest public zine collection in Australia, approximately 6000 (December 2009). The collection focus is zines produced in Australia, however, occasional non-Australian zines have been acquired inadvertently.

Individual zines in the collection have not been catalogued on the Library's online public access catalogue (December 2009), aside from the limited number of zines that were acquired by legal deposit, largely before 2000; however, box lists are available listing titles in each box. Zines are filed by acquisition date, e.g. "1/7, June 2007", "2/7 2007" etc, as well as a separate running number on all boxes in the collection. A project is underway to convert these box lists into catalogue records.

History

The State Library of Victoria began actively collecting zines in 2000, following a decision to acquire all Australian zines stocked at Polyester Books in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

More recently the State Library has also initiated a similar 'blanket order' for Australian zines with Sticky, and has been the recipient of a number of personal zine collections (e.g. Lachlan Musicman, Eloise Peace etc.) and organisational collections (e.g. Spacekids Zine Collection and the Spiral Arm Distro Collection) which has significantly extended the coverage of the zine collection backwards into the 1990s.