I printed a zine for a bookmaking class I had in uni, it was one of our final assignments and it was so much fun.
A basic zine (the ROOTS of zine creation) is essentially xerox copies cut+pasted together, done cheaply, quickly, efficiently. Something with content that raises awareness of an individual or collective's efforts. So there really aren't rules to zines, no specific size but typically A4 folded in half (again, cost conscious).
It sounds like your zine project's a higher-scale, though. THE BASICS: Work a bit above print-ready dpi (300+) and using Publisher to lay your pages out is ideal. I used Photoshop and my brains and it was a bloody nightmare, hah. The way I figured out to organise pages for print was to make a mini mock-up by folding pages together and pasting draft prints of the zine on each page. Then, take the folded pages back apart and orgainse digitally (page 2 directly across from page 17 so they appear on the same page and so on) for printing at home.
And a lot of people use staples to bind because it's fast and simple but since you're doing a small run, coptic stitch is very easy to learn and makes for a much nicer presentation (I used it on the zines in the picture).