Library news for Artists

ZineWiki is an open-source encyclopedia devoted to zines and independent media. It covers the history, production, distribution and culture of the small press.

The Zine and E-Zine Resource Guide is a collection of essays focusing on the history of zines and the underground press scene. Essays include Stephen Perkins’ ‘Approaching the ’80s zine scene: a background survey and selected annotated bibliography’, with chapters on punk zines, mail art, and artists’ magazines.

The British Library is making available three new sound and moving image services in its Reading Rooms:

BBC Pilot Service
A trial service bringing together the BBC’s programme catalogue, Radio Times data and BBC television and radio programmes recorded off-air from mid-2007 to the end of 2011. There are approximately 2.2 million catalogue records and 190,000 playable programmes, both television and radio.

Broadcast News
This service provides access to daily television and radio news programmes from seventeen channels (fifteen TV, two radio) broadcast in the UK since May 2010, recorded off-air by the British Library.

TRILT (Television & Radio Index for Learning & Teaching)
TRILT is a database of all UK television and radio broadcasts since 2001 (and selectively back to 1995). It covers every channel, every broadcast and every repeat, some 15 million records so far and growing by a million per year.

More information here.

Black and White Movies is a website devoted to public domain classic films with expired copyright. Some are available for download and new films are added all the time. Genre sections on Western, Action, Comedy, Horror, etc.

The London Sound Survey is collection of Creative Commons-licensed sound recordings of places, events and wildlife in the capital. Historical references too are gathered to find out how London’s sounds have changed. Collections include urban wildlife, London’s canals and waterways, recordings made in and around London in the 1930s and 40s, and much more.

Tyne & Wear Archives

Flikr: the Commons is a collection of image archives donated by cultural institutions from around the world, free to use under the Creative Commons licence. Institutions who have donated collections include The New York Public Library, National Galleries of Scotland, Getty Research Institute and many more.

Jackson Pollock 51, Hans Namuth’s ten minute film of the artist painting on glass, can be streamed at Open Culture.

A selection of concrete poetry is also now available at Ubuweb, including a complete run of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s legendary magazine, Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, 1962-1968. Also here are several examples of visual poetry by Dom Sylvester Houedard, a pioneer of British concrete poetry and typewriter-driven typstracts.

The Fluxus Anthology, including dozens of soundworks recorded between 1958 and 1990, is online at Ubuweb here. It includes recordings by George Maciunas, Robert Filliou, Wolf Vostell, Al Hanson, Carolee Schneemann, Dick Higgins and others.

Five films by Yvonne Rainer are now available on Ubuweb: Hand movie (1966), Lives of performers (1972), Film about a woman who… (1974), Journies from Berlin/1971 (1980), and Privilege (1990).