On Archiving Punk

​What happens when a subculture becomes history? And who gets to preserve it?

Take a look inside the San Francisco Public Library’s Punk Archive and explore the stories, artifacts, and creative communities that shaped San Francisco’s punk history.

The evening offers a behind-the-scenes look at the archive as a growing, community-built collection, exploring how punk materials enter the archive, how provenance helps us understand their histories, and how archivists process, preserve, and make these collections accessible. The event also highlights the collaborative nature of punk archiving, including the important roles of donors and contributors, and what it means to care for fliers, photographs, and other ephemera from an underground cultural movement.

The event will feature Penelope Houston of the Avengers, who started the San Francisco Punk Archive with the support of the San Francisco Public Library, which holds key punk materials and ephemera; Freya Channing, archivist of the San Francisco Punk Archive and manager of the Little Maga/Zine Collection; and Christina Moretta, photo curator and manager of the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the official archives for the City and County of San Francisco.