Brooklyn College Zine Collection Opening

This Tuesday will be an exciting day for New Yorkers who love zines, as the long-awaited Brooklyn College Zine Collection is officially opening! The collection was started in 2011 by Brooklyn College librarian Alycia Sellie and primarily features zines that are connected to Brooklyn (specific collection parameters available here).

Tuesday’s celebration is open to the public and will feature readings by Brooklyn College students and Brooklyn zinesters (including my zine buddies Elvis Bakaitis and Kate Wadkins). I’ll be reading from my zine “My Feminist Friends” and am especially pleased because my first academic library internship ever was at Brooklyn College!

More info about the event is available in the press release.

Flyer by zine interns Sarah Rappo and Erica Saunders

Directory of Open Access Books

If you’re like me and you were quite enthralled by the idea of open access (read: freely accessible) scholarly journal articles, you’ll most likely be equally pleased with open access books! The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), developed in part by the creators of the Directory of Open Access Journals, was launched in April of this year and already boasts 1000+ free academic peer-reviewed books.

Remember, since these books are open access it means you can download an entire book for free- I know it sounds like a joke, but it’s the truth.  Let’s pretend that I’d like to access a 2005 book titled European Cinema: Face to Face  with Hollywood and written by Thomas Elsaesser. If you locate the book’s record on DOAB all you would have to do to open it as a PDF file would be to click on the “Fulltext” link.

You can locate books using either the advanced search box or browse via subject (my personal favorite- I’m the type who brings up the topic of subject headings at dinner), title, or publisher.

This is how happy open access books make me. Citation: Davey, A. (Photographer). (2008). Smiling dog. [Digital image]. Retrieved from http://www.flickr.com/photos/adavey/2881915005/

CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook is a great free, credible resource for anyone interested in obtaining current background information about a country. Topics covered include geography, economy, people, history, transportation, etc.

There are also regional maps and images of flags of the world, both of which can be downloaded as JPGs or PDFs. Here’s the Czech Republic’s page as an example! Each country has its own photo gallery as well.

Guide to New York City Women’s and Social Justice Organizations

When I worked at Sarah Lawrence I would often refer patrons to the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s wonderful Guide to NYC Women’s and Social Justice Organizations.

The Guide is a directory of 500+ NYC-based organizations which all work for sexual, racial, economic and/or social justice. You can check out the organizations either alphabetically or categorically (e.g. Activism, Arts and Media, and Labor).

It’s a great place to explore if you’re looking for employment or volunteer opportunities, as well as building connections with people who are doing amazing things in our community on a daily basis.

Queer Immigration Reading List

My friend Charlotte sent me a link awhile ago that I’ve been meaning to blog about. Published by Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, the Queer Immigration Reading List is an excellent bibliography of 20+ free online articles pertaining to experiences of LGBTQ immigrants in the United States.

While the bibliography is a bit dated (the most recent articles were published in 2009), the librarian in me thought this resource could particularly be of use to people researching queers and immigration rights from a historical perspective.

On a related note, my friend Stina and I recently wrote a joint book review on two recent texts exploring the treatment of queers in the U.S. criminal justice system, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. The same website, Coloradans for Immigrant Rights, posted a well-written and informative 2011 paper called “Connecting the Dots: How Immigrant Repression and U.S. Incarceration Serve Global Capitalist Interests,” which I would definitely recommend to anyone looking to learn more about these significant issues. The paper is available for free download here.