Zine Thesaurus History

2008 - The Zine Subject Thesaurus was created by Amanda Stevens when she and Zachary Howarth-Schueler made an online catalogue for the Anchor Archive Zine Library using open source content management system Drupal (version 5).

The Thesaurus was made up of subject terms from the zines in the Anchor Archive catalogue but was managed separately using THEW32, a different open source software tool developed by Timothy C. Craven for managing thesauri. As terms were added to the catalogue, Amanda added them to the Thesaurus in THEW32 and created full records for them. She periodically generated a PDF in THEW32 and uploaded it to the Anchor Archive website so others could use the Thesaurus.

2008-2012 - The Thesaurus was developed as 70% of the Anchor Archive's zine collection was catalogued by volunteers.

2015 - The Zine Thesaurus in THEW32 received its last update and the last PDF version was published on the Anchor Archive website.

2018 - The Anchor Archive rebuilt and migrated its catalogue and website to Drupal version 8.

2019-2020 - Amanda Stevens gathered a group of zine librarians that used the Thesaurus together 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.

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.

2021-2022 - The same group of zine librarians plus some more reviewed and updated the entire Zine Subject Thesaurus - recreating term records from THEW32 on the Drupal platform, creating full term records from new subject terms that had been added by Anchor Archive cataloguers, and creating new term records as needed.

The group met bi-weekly in virtual "editathons" to update the Thesaurus.

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 and 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.

Zine Thesaurus virtual Editathons resumed to continue creating term records from new terms added by Anchor Archive cataloguers and add new terms suggested by the Thesaurus user community.