The Lithuanian Fanzine Collection: Creating and Visualizing Metadata

This article aims to highlight aspects of creating the Lithuanian fanzine collection available at Lithuania's Youth Culture Digital Archive with a more detailed focus on building fanzine metadata structure and metadata visualization options.Fanzines are informal or alternative press created and distributed by youth subcultures.Despite the lack of bibliographic information that fanzines provide and the manual population of descriptive metadata by professional metadata creators, it is a time-consuming process that requires agreement on a standardized vocabulary, phrases, and terminology.Nevertheless, metadata is essential in improving document search, preserving fanzine culture, and enriching fanzine analysis.This study presents metadata structure and visualizations linkages that represent the scope of the fanzine collection.The results show that a well-structured metadata schema facilitates effective data management, search, and retrieval of information reflecting the distinctive characteristics of fanzines.Additional metadata fields (subculture, data type, collectors, and comments) provide contextual details, enabling more precise record identification and a deeper contextual understanding of specific youth group publications.Moreover, collection overview graphs (timeline, map, and network) serve as valuable tools for analyzing the collection and help the readers gain insight into fanzine culture from the perspective of the fanzine publishing period, the geographical distribution of fanzine production, and fanzines in personal collections by understanding fanzine circulation extent.