"My Zine Life is My Private Life": Reframing Authority Control from Detective Work to an Ethic of Care

Abstract

The essence of identity management is authoritatively correlating people with the works they create—but what happens when people don’t want to be paired with their work? Contemporary artists and authors who create controversial artwork and literature have concerns around controlling their identity which may change over time and require thoughtful policies which give them as much autonomy as possible. The authors share our experience with zines, artists' books, and protest art, outlining the unique privacy concerns of creators of this type of work, with special consideration to the maintenance of authority files by large academic institutions and government agencies. We conclude by recommending potential infrastructure solutions for authority data structures to address privacy issues by taking cues from archival practice as well as arguing for the need for clarity around who has control over data in order to ensure creators have the right to determine when, how, and if they are identified with a particular work.

“He Lied to the People, Saying ‘I Am Nebuchadnezzar’”: Issues in Authority Control for Rebels, Usurpers, Eccentric Nobility, and Dissenting Royalty

“…Catalogers… should take the time to recognize and empathize with the persons that information [in an NAR] is describing." 40 Approaches that call for authorial input and selfdescription rely on the active participation of a living subject. An approach for a historical person is described in a paper by Wagner concerning Joe Carstairs, a gender nonconforming boat racer active in the 1920s.…”