Unless something goes terribly wrong in the printing, I’ll have finished copies of Codslap! The Library Society of the World Zine with me at ALA. Copies will be available by mail after ALA (watch this space).

I thought I’d share with you the introduction that I wrote:

Thanks for picking up this, the first issue of the Library Society of the World’s zine, Codslap! If you aren’t familiar with the LSW, it’s an ad-hoc group of librarians who like to meet online (and in person when we can) to swap ideas, ask questions, and enjoy each other’s company. We believe that you don’t need a large formal organization for professional development. Josh Neff, who is the founder & sheriff of the LSW wrote a fanciful story for this zine about the founding of the LSW, but see the back cover for URLs and more if you are interested in taking part on this planet.

Shortly after I announced that I’d be compiling this zine that you hold in your hands, the following exchange took place on the December 10, 2008 episode of the (late, lamented) podcast, Uncontrolled Vocabulary:

David Rothman: You know what’s funny, Greg? As much as I love Steve Lawson, I will not and cannot support this endeavor.

UV host, Greg Schwartz: Tell me why.

David Rothman: Because it is wrong to be doing a dead tree endeavor….It’s an incredibly inefficient way of getting information out. It’s environmentally irresponsible. I mean, it might be charmingly archaic if there’s some, you know, real artisanship to the way the paper is made or used, but there’s certainly none of that, it’s going to be done on a photocopier. It’s just terribly unprofessional. Honestly, I think information professionals should be pushing everything towards the digital. I think we should be trying to abolish print journals.

First of all, I love David, too. Seriously. So I didn’t take this as a personal thing. David’s also a smart cookie, so if he thinks that putting together a paper zine isn’t just quirky, but something approaching downright immoral, then it seems like something worth looking into.

I think David is thinking of this zine as “information.” When it comes to information, I agree with David. I’m not so much into paper journals anymore. I never understand it at work when someone hands me a document they created on the computer then printed out. I don’t want a stack of paper that can’t be searched or altered. When it comes to information, I’d rather have bits than atoms, in the old Nicholas Negroponte formulation.

But I don’t think of a zine as information any more than I think of a love letter as information. If someone writes you a love letter on a scrap of notebook paper, you don’t complain that it’s not on handmade paper. You don’t ask them to scan it, OCR it, and email it to you in RTF. You don’t say “it’s not very professional of you to call me Boo-Boo.” You read it and cherish it and keep it in your sock drawer so you can pull it out years later and remember that time when you were in love.

Zines have a lot more in common with love letters than they do with journals. This zine has contributions from about a dozen people who just wanted to share something funny or thoughtful or useful with other library types. Some of them are my best friends, and some of them are people I didn’t know before they sent something in for the zine. A few are zine veterans, but I think for most of them, this is their first experience with writing for a zine. I thank them all for making this little experiment in love a success & hope I did their contributions justice.