PUNK AS A ZINE LIBRARY by Jenna Freedman, Zine Librarian
People often ask me if zine makers ever express a punk rock suspicion of librarians
wanting to shelve zines in their library collections, perhaps in the process coopting
zines' message and ethos and maybe stealing their soul a little. Fortunately for
people like me who wants to preserve and provide access to zines, the answer is no.
Over the last ten years of curating the zine library at Barnard College in New York
City I have had three or four people ask me to remove their zine from the collection,
but for reasons of privacy not principle. In order to promote understanding between
punk zinesters and librarians, I thought it might be nice to share some info on the
what, why and how of zine libraries with readers of Maximumrocknroll.
A Library's Mission
Everything I will describe below is in some way informed by the library or
collection's goals in life. Sometimes people get upset when a library—or more likely
an archive—wants to know their business before letting someone see its zines.
When an archive or special collections library does allow you access to the zines,
they may restrict what writing implements you can use and whether you can
photocopy or photograph the zines. They might even make you wear white gloves
while reading zines. (Not usually, but a girl can dream!). Being persnickety does not
make a library or archives evil. It just means that they're focused on preserving
zines (for research and as evidence of punk rock lives for people in future
centuries).
Other libraries may privilege access over preservation, meaning that they don't care
as much if a zine gets lost, stolen or damaged, as long as it's used. They're all about
zines by the people, for the people, now!
Libraries fall on all points of this spectrum, including mine, which occupies two
spots—one for preservation and one for access. (Because we try to get two copies of
each zine, the first lives in an acid-free blue box in a climate-controlled environment,
and the second goes into the open stacks for people to borrow and use in any way they
see fit in the privacy of their own home or on a Greyhound bus.)
Library statements and policies also govern what's in our collections, not just who
can see/use the collection. Sometimes it's obvious from the library's name, e.g.,
Queer Zine Archive Project or POC Zine Project. If the collection is in a women's
college, like Barnard's or Smith's, you can guess that there's at least some
emphasis on zines by women. (Trans-inclusive, in case that needs to be said. To most
zine librarians it doesn't need to be said, because it's understood, but we spell it out, in
case it's not obvious to everyone.)
Acquisitions
Some of the ways we get zines:
 Donation
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
o Collector – This is often long after the donor acquired the zines
themselves. Usually the person was a participant in zine culture and
got the zines by trading or buying the zines. Normally they held onto
their zine collection until their parents evicted the zines from their
attic or basement or until some kind of disaster scared them into
wanting to find the zines a safer home. (That's what happened with
Action Girl Sarah Dyer and the reason she donated her collection to the
Sallie Bingham Center at Duke University.)
o Creator – You give us your zines at zine fests and readings, through
the mail or digitized via email. Personally I think professional zine
libraries (I have long struggled with a word to differentiate official-type
libraries (e.g., public, academic, or school) from DIY library projects.
Milo Miller from QZAP likes to call workers at the latter "barefoot
librarians." I like "chosen community" as a potential descriptor. As for
libraries where the librarians are paid and have a graduate degree or
two in librarian science and/or a related field, "professional" sort of
works, but I'm open to something better.) should always pay for zines
other than unsolicited donations, though. We pay for expensive books
and mad expensive journals that enrich not their creators, but their
publishers, so the least we can do is fork over 2 bucks for your zine
that cost you $3 to make.
 Some libraries can't do the right thing, because of
administrative red tape or institutional bigotry toward selfpublishing. Hate the sin, but try to love your librarian anyway.
 Other libraries, typically self-funded community spaces, are
spending all their money to keep the space running so when
they can't afford to pay for any of their stuff wanting your zine
for free is legit.
Trade: this is one of my favorite methods. It equalizes the relationship
between zinester and zine librarian. A lot of zine librarians make zines. There
is a collection of library worker zines at the University of Wisconsin's
library school.
Purchase – We buy zines at zine fests, bookstores, infoshops, distros and
Etsy. I guess some libraries buy them from eBay and professional collectors,
but that doesn't seem to me to be the norm. I once bought zines from a third
party collector, but would be unlikely to do it again. I'd rather save my
budget for paying authors and artists.
Cataloging
Librarians and historians, too, sometimes say that if an item isn't described, or even
on the right place on the shelf, it doesn't exist. That's a snooty attitude, but not
entirely without justification in the context of a library or archive. Library catalogs
and archival finding aids can do as little as listing author and title information or can
go into much more detail with official Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH—
look it up!) or more casual keywords, descriptions of the zines, and reproductions of
their covers.
Much of this work is subjective, even though many librarians try not to inject
judgment or analysis to their descriptors. Even so, we're stuck with language
meaning different things to different people. For example, the LCSH for American
Indians/Native Americans/Indigenous people of the United States is "Indians of
North America" and its closest approximation of the concept of "queer" is "Sexual
minorities." Neither of these terms is likely to be embraced by the majority of punks
or zine makers, and yet sometimes librarians choose to use them because it helps
zines to be more visible in library catalog searches. Cataloging is focused on the
researcher, rather than the publisher.
Most zine libraries have some kind of online public interface for their catalog. Some
are on the open web as lists (like the Denver Zine Library, in searchable databases
(like the Independent Publishing Resource Center) or via services like
LibraryThing (like Soapbox). Others are part of larger library catalogs (like
Barnard's) and/or are included in a giant cooperative catalog called WorldCat.
Google Books is now harvesting WorldCat records, so lots more zines are now
appearing in search engine searches, which can be a little unnerving to someone
who made a zine in the 1990s and is doing a little self-Googling and finds a keyword
rich description of something they made as a teenager that may or may not reflect
their current views.
If you don't like how your zine is described, get in touch with the zine librarian;
there's a good chance they'll change it. We work hard to be responsive to the zine
community. Many of us are extra sensitive to zine makers' concerns because we
share them. I myself have reached out to a zine librarian when I felt uncomfortable
about seeing my zine represented in a collection without being consulted, and the
zine librarian welcomed my feedback.
Are Zine Libraries Punk?
I'd like to think the answer is yes, but that is for you to decide. It's not like there's
one definition of punk. To me, the punk ethos of DIY and mutual aid are wellreflected in zine libraries. Libraries are like free stores for books, databases, data,
DVDs, internet access, community meeting space and more. Zine libraries are
including punk with its raggedy and radical viewpoints into history by asserting and
preserving our voices in public, academic, digital and other libraries and archives.
We are doing so in a loving and thoughtful manner, challenging what is privileged by
many libraries' holdings.
Getting the unmediated thoughts of people normally outside mainstream
publishing, except as case studies and other types of subjects written about by
educationally and otherwise privileged yet uniformed people with their own
agendas is a radical and powerful act. While it may not be the women of Liberia
ending a civil war, it's making sure that people involved in revolutionary acts, large
and small have their stories remembered on their own terms.
Andrew Beccone, founder of the Reanimation Library put it this way in an email to
me, "I agree that there are some very strong resonances to activism at work in the
DIY spirit of the library. I learned most of that from playing in punk rock bands for
many years in Minneapolis. In many ways, I think that the library is the most punk
rock thing that I have ever done."
Resources
Find a zine library near you: http://zines.barnard.edu/zine-libraries
Discover other zine library resources: http://zinelibraries.info
Join a zine librarians group
http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/zinelibrarians/info
http://wemakezines.ning.com/group/zinelibrarians
Celebrate International Zine Library Day: http://zinelibraryday.wikispaces.com
Attend a zine librarians unconference: http://zinelibraries.info/category/zluc or at
least bring your zine librarian a donut
http://clpzines.wordpress.com/2013/08/09/d-o-n-u-t-s.
Websites of zine libraries and library resources mentioned in this essay
 Barnard Zine Library http://zines.barnard.edu and
http://clio.columbia.edu/catalog?&&q=zines&search_field=form_genre
(example of a library catalog-type catalog)
 Denver Zine Library http://denverzinelibrary.org/catalog (example of a listtype catalog)
 Duke University http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/findingdb/zines/dyer
(about a flood in Sarah Dyers's basement being the origin of the zine
collections there)
 Independent Publishing Resource Center, IPRC http://library.iprc.org
(example of a database-type catalog)
 POC Zine Project http://poczineproject.tumblr.com
 Queer Zine Archive http://qzap.org
 Reanimation Library http://www.reanimationlibrary.org (not a zine library,
but since I mentioned it, here's the link)
 Smith College
http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss356_main.html
 Soapbox Zine Library http://www.librarything.com/catalog/soapbox
(example of a LibraryThing catalog)
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
University of Iowa, http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/speccoll/msc/tomsc350/msc331/fanzinescollection.html (example of a archival
finding aids)
University of Wisconsin SLIS
http://slislib.library.wisc.edu/collections/zine.html
WorldCat zine holdings
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=su%3Azines&qt=advanced&dblist=638
(In this free version of WorldCat there's no way to separate out things that
are about zines vs. zines themselves, which is why so many of the top results
are books.)
Here are two images if you want some art
Papercut Zine Library, Boston, MA. Photo by Tim O'Connell, used with permission.
OCAD University Zine Library Day, Toronto, Ontario. Photo of Jessica Goodman and
Sol Deun Kim used with permission.