Dear Zine Librarians and ZineCat partners, I'm going to write this email as if to people who have never heard of ZineCat <https://zinecat.org/> before, so folks who already have familiarity with the project, please bear with me. For nearly 15 years, collaborators in this group have been discussing building a union catalog for zines. From 2016-2020 Lauren Kehoe and I made ZineCat the focus of our digital humanities masters degree at the CUNY Graduate Center. If you browse the ZineCat blog <https://blog.zinecat.org/>, you can get more information about the project as it was developed, including issues of *Shared Authority*, the ZineCat zine. The catalog, which represents holdings from nine libraries and archives in the US and Canada, is built in an open source DAM (digital assets manager) called CollectiveAccess <https://collectiveaccess.org/>. Poised to move to the next phase, possibly with the help of an NEH grant (🤞), we want to take a moment and consider if CollectiveAccess, or a DAM in general, which is built with fully digital assets in mind, is the best tool for our catalog. Most of our collections consist of records, not the zines themselves (excepting QZAP, so far). We're wondering if a library catalog might be more appropriate. Among the biggest priorities when choosing a tool are authority control and the ability to ingest full library's worths of records at a time. *So...what we want to know from y'all, is do you have open source catalogs and DAMs you recommend?* For example, have you used Koha and loved or hated it? Note that Omeka is off the table because of the lack of authority control. Also, look for a message from Lauren soon about scheduling a ZineCat update via Zoom. If you want to read even deeper on the project, check out the etherpad, where we took notes from 2014-2019. Jenna -- Jenna Freedman | she, her Curator of the Barnard Zine Library make an appointment <https://barnard.libcal.com/appointments/jenna-freedman> | https://is.gd/jennacalendar https://linktr.ee/barnardzinelibrary _______________________________________________ Zlunioncat mailing list Zlunioncat@lists.qzap.org http://lists.qzap.org/listinfo.cgi/zlunioncat-qzap.org