Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben

One of my students at SLU, Carolyn Dellinger ’16, is starting to catalogue the Antifa Jugendfront stickers from Infoladen Daneben that I scanned over the summer (see Berlin-based sticker collections in previous post).  From 79 original raw scans, I came up with a total of 48 edited image files consisting of 16 complete stickers, 4 full sheets of “pre-Photoshop” color-separated stickers, and various individual color-separated stickers and overlays.  Carolyn also created seven image files that are diptychs or triptychs to show the color separations side by side.  The 54 image files in this set can be viewed on my Flickr page for Stickerkitty’s collection (uncatalogued).

072+064+056_edited

This is the first time I’ll be working with a student on more advanced cataloguing, and so it’s sort of a trial run for future Weaving the Streets & People’s Archive (WSPA) projects.  One of the long-term goals for WSPA is to develop a process to train students and others on how to gather and catalogue examples of street art for a digital archive.  The first step in cataloguing is to create standard metadata fields and terminologies.  (Metadata is data about data.)  In many cases, fields will be populated with the same metadata (i.e., creator = unknown, time span = 1991, geographic location = Berlin, Germany, etc.).  Students will then complete the more difficult fields, such as description, subject, key words, and themes.

Below is the outline for cataloguing the Antifa Jugendfront stickers.  Information in [brackets] will be used as is for every record.  Carolyn will create new metadata for the fields marked in bold.

  • Title [Antifa Jugendfront – and all or most of the main text on the sticker using a logical, “natural language” approach in approximately 10 to 20 words].  We’re using “Antifa Jugendfront” at the beginning of each record in order for the stickers to appear together in the digital archive.
  • Title-Alternative (any additional text that doesn’t fit in Title)
  • Title-Translation (try Google Translate and see what you get)
  • Creator [unknown]
  • Contributor [Antifa Jugendfront (Antifa Youth Front)]
  • Source [Infoladen Daneben, Berlin, Germany]
  • Time Span [1991]
  • Geographic Location [Berlin, Germany]
  • Language [German]
  • Class [graphic arts]
  • Type [sticker, spucki]
  • Format/Medium [offset lithograph – black and red ink on yellow paper]
  • Description (will need to create guidelines)
  • Curator’s Statement – (CT will write – mention both sets of individual stickers and paired stickers)
  • Key Words (will need to create guidelines)
  • Subject (Arline will do)
  • Themes (see attached handout)
  • Notes [Scanned by Catherine Tedford, August 2013.]
  • Cataloguer, Date [Carolyn Dellinger, SLU ‘16]
  • Digital Image File Name (original) (use the edited image files you created)
  • Digital Image File Name (new ContentDM name) (to be determined later)
  • Rights [Please see http://www.stlawu.edu/gallery/copyright/.]

I did some research last week on Antifa Jugendfront and was surprised and delighted to find that several examples of the stickers we’re cataloguing are also available online at the International Institute of Social History, based in Amsterdam.  I’ve never come across street art graphics catalogued to this extent, and for the geeks out there, the records have call numbers, as well as super geek MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) standards metadata (which stopped Arline in her tracks).

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The sticker Gegen Sexismus und Frauen-Unterdrückung (http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/788102) is included in the IISH catalogue, but in this case it’s represented as a poster at 29.5 x 42 cm.  It’s also dated ca. 1989, so that confirms the time span we have listed in our database.

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A full sheet of stickers is also included in the IISH catalogue, measuring 30.5 x 43.5 cm before they were trimmed to sticker size.  See http://search.socialhistory.org/Record/787803.

Infoladen full sheet