ASSESSMENT OF NEED
Alternative media projects have historically provided counter-perspectives to dominant mainstream media. Whether they amplify the voices of individuals pushed to the margins of a mainstream society, advance political ideologies counter to the status quo, or simply address interests that fall outside of the accepted mainstream, alternative media projects provide an invaluable counterweight to consolidated corporate media. Wherever there has been concentration of power (in politics, culture, religion, or media, for example), there have been alternative voices that spring up to challenge, question, subvert, and eventually shape the dominant message. Those “voices” — whether they appear in print, online, television, or radio — provide a valuable lens through which to view history from diverse perspectives.
These magazines are small-press projects with nationwide distribution, which creates a unique situation for librarians. Small-press titles occupy a gray area between the much larger magazines (which they often look like thanks to the democratization of desktop publishing resources that make publishing professionally looking works much more accessible) and more rare small press creations (like zines) — the latter of whose value is more immediately identifiable to special collections librarians. Creating a digital collection of these titles and related ephemeral materials is critical to preserving a historical record of titles that may otherwise fall between the cracks.
Indeed, ProQuest has already recognized the value of archiving grassroots publications in the creation of its Alt-Press Watch database project. Alt-Press Watch provides “researchers total access to both regional and metropolitan perspectives on local, national, and international issues. Providing an alternative to corporate controlled media, the Alt-Press Watch database presents big stories from small sources.” The database was created with the understanding that the inclusion of multiple perspectives increases our understanding of the political, cultural, or social landscape.
CAP is a digital collections project that builds on the initiative of ProQuest’s Alt-Press Watch by supplementing full-text access to articles from the print magazines with digital images of the actual layout of the print resources. The value of providing such context is evident when we consider the information users may be able to infer from examining what businesses paid to advertise in the magazine, how certain advertisements were placed in relation to copy, and other editorial design elements that are all but lost when full-text records of an article are all that is available. In addition to returning a critically important element (the layout, art, and design of the magazine) to the bibliographic trail, CAP aims to also archive related print and born-digital content created by the publishers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the of the small-press landscape.
Born out of an expressed need from the magazine publishers, editors, and volunteers for some type of historical record of Clamor Magazine, CAP is intended to provide an institutional memory of a project that, like many small organizations that are understaffed and overextended, has never enjoyed the benefits of a formalized archival system to preserve the work that has been done. As such, CAP aims to accomplish the following over the course of one year:
- Digitize over 3,000 pages of text and art from the first seven years of Clamor Magazine’s publishing history while also creating an infrastructure to add new issue content as it is published.
- Aggregate hundreds of born-digital objects including texts from email updates sent out by the publishers to subscribers, blog posts written by Clamor staff and published on the web, and pages from the magazine’s website.
- Provide free access to the collection via a secure server (password-protected) online for use by registered users.
Clamor explicitly aims to serve the media needs of communities and individuals who find themselves shut out from traditional media outlets. According to its mission, “Clamor publishes content of, by, for, and with marginalized communities. From the kitchen table to shop floor, the barrio to the playground, the barbershop to the student center, it's old school meets new school in a battle for a better tomorrow.”
In addition to serving the publishing needs of the organization and its staff, CAP will also serve as a model for peer publications that are also in jeopardy of leaving very little historical evidence that they even existed. Save for the printed copies of these publications that may be preserved in some libraries, many of these publications have no plan for creating an institutional record of their work. Such a record will be invaluable not only to the magazine publishers and staff, but also to related media makers, scholars, and lifelong learners interested in investigating and interrogating the history of small-press magazines and the historical context in which they existed. To that end, CAP is proposed in the spirit of ensuring the cultural heritage of these grassroots projects that may otherwise be lost or suffer from an incomplete historical record of their existence.