A very brief explanation of what this is:

The zine came about after Chris Dodge asked me to help compile a festschrift zine in Sandy Berman's honor. After everything he'd been through in the past several months, Chris thought he needed something to cheer him up. The idea was that it would presented to him at ALA Annual in New Orleans. This required that all of the contributors keep it secret from him, and they did. It went over really well. Sandy certainly seemed to appreciate it, and everyone else who's read it appears to have as well.

I compiled it by sending out mass emails to various listservs: namely the SRRT Action Council list, the PLG list, the gay-libn list, and the anarchist librarians list. That got me a handful of contributions. (If I remember correctly, Steve, Barbara, Suzanne, Jessamyn, Karen Eliot, and Dorchester Dog Hip were the only ones who sent anything right off. Good for them.) In a panic, I started bombarding people with individual emails asking them - no, begging them - to contribute. Luckily, it all worked out in the end, and this site is proof.

Fun facts about Kiss My Filing Indicators:

• While this is issue #1, it isn't actually the first issue. KMFI #0 was a thing (I'm hesitant to call it a "zine") that I did for a cataloging class in August 1998. It was four half-size pages of sarcastic discussion about cataloging Internet resources with a few Lynda Barry cartoons thrown in for good measure. If you don't already have a copy, you're not going to get one from me; the actual flats are long gone, and the two copies I kept for myself got mangled in my apartment somehow. Don't worry, you didn't miss much.
• There were three factual errors in it: one that got corrected before printing, and two that didn't. Dorchester Dog Hip initially wrote that Sandy had had a quadruple bypass; he had a quintuple. (In the print version, "quintuple" is in a different font from the rest of the text because it got pasted over "quadruple" at the last moment. Tee hee.) Peter McDonald claimed to have initially met Sandy at a meeting to form PLG in 1989. Unfortunately, neither he nor Sandy were actually there. It's still a good story, though. My mistake is nowhere near that interesting: I merely described myself as an "Illinoisian", which apparently is not the official term used to describe an Illinois native. I guess it's "Illinoisan", though I'm not entirely sure. (I base this assumption on having seen a billboard encouraging "Illinoisans" to become organ donors; I'm assuming that the state government knows how to spell the word correctly, but maybe not.)

Enough babbling for now: on to the zine.

P.S. Address any and all criticisms to katia@dangpow.com. Thanks.

P.P.S. I created a guestbook for this site out of boredom. You can sign it if you like. You don't have to, though.