The New Monastic Librarians

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Scholars and journalists, at least, are grateful for the effort. The Labadie Collection is known for its unique source materials, including photos, many of which are available online (www.lib.umich.edu/spec-coll/labadie).

Julie Bartel and Brooke Young Collecting Zines

Though public libraries strive today to offer popular materials like comic books and hit CDs, it's hard to find the small, self-published periodicals known as zines. Many libraries carry zine anthologies and books on zine making, but few collect zines themselves.

Julie Bartel and Brooke Young, librarians at Salt Lake City Public Library, decided to change that. With library support, they started a zine collection with a budget of $600 in 1997. What began on a single magazine rack now includes more than 6,000 titles, and their current annual budget of $2,000 goes a long way at $2 and $3 a pop.

Bartel and Young want other librarians to take zines seriously. Bartel has written From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library (American Library Association, 2004), and she and Young both speak at library conferences and alternative press gatherings. As Bartel explains, zines are a necessary alternative, a conduit for fresh, uncensored, noncommercial expression. And the collection draws people who have never been in a library before.

"Every library should have a zine box," Young adds, and maybe soon more of them will. Bartel says she spends much of her time fielding questions from library school students who are interested in starting and managing zine collections of their own.

Jenna Freedman Recording Feminism's Raw Feed

Jenna Freedman started a feminist zine collection at Barnard College in New York City partly to protect history's precious first draft. "In 20 years you will not be able to find out what really happened at the protests against the Republican National Convention by reading old newspapers," she says, referring to events last summer in Manhattan. "They didn't cover it, but zinesters did."

Freedman, a librarian and coordinator of reference services at Barnard, collects zines by urban women that focus on "activism, anarchism, body image, feminism, lesbians, menstruation, parenting, sexual assault, war, and other topics." She encourages other librarians to acquire materials beyond what they see reviewed in trade sources like Choice and Library Journal. If they don't, she says, they're being "passivists."

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print