‘Radical Brighton: Alternative/Left/Freak/Radical/Hippie, etc. local papers’
A blog has been launched to document the progress of the Radical Brighton project, a digitisation project to preserve the ephemeral (and therefore archivally elusive and highly perishable) locally-produced radical publications- zines, countercultural activist publications, comics, diaries, calendars, etc., often hand-made – emerging from the UK, and Brighton in particular, from the 1960s to the 1980s. The starting point for the project is the material microfilmed by Brighton’s Harvester Press in the early 1990s, ‘The Undeground and Alternative Press in Britain’, which is being digitised by St Peters House Library, Brighton University.
The resource aims to document the grassroots publishing activity of what the blog describes as ‘time capsules of these youth generations’ and will offer invaluable access to primary source material for anyone researching the social, political and cultural climate of activism at a local level during these years.
The blog is at:
http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/radicalpress
All works available are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
To access the digitised papers, researchers will be able to browse by format or title in the Categories field. Alternatively they can browse by subject Tags which are embedded in each post, along with bibliographic information about each item. This project also documents the process of creating an archive of local press which you can read about by looking at the ‘documentation’ Category.