Librarians of the Ephemeral

There's a neat article [via Ron Silliman's linkfarm today] in the Boston Globe about how certain savvy librarians (many of whom are zinesters or former zinesters themselves) are managing the collection of zines, chapbooks, & DIY etceteras, some going so far as to establish proper Zine Collections:

[Jennifer] Freedman [at Barnard College] is part of a generation that grew up with zines during their heyday in the 1990s. Now she is part of an emerging community of professionally trained librarians who are trying to make zines a part of the modern academic library system. It is a community, Freedman says, that faces a difficult question: How do libraries -- institutions that by nature require a strict, stately style of micromanagement -- assimilate these self-published and occasionally category-defying dispatches from the cultural hinterlands?

"I think because we're all making it up, everyone is trying something and we'll see what the best practice is," Freedman explains. "Zinesters are not thinking about libraries when they write them" -- rarely do they contain copyright statements, dates of publication, or even reliable contact information.

Read the rest.

Then if you're near Barnard, check out their collection in person & report back, will ya? There are also similar collections at Duke University, the New York Public Library (um, news to me!), the Salt Lake City Public Library, and "about 20 colleges and universities."

What we need is a list.