How to Pick a Zine Library
Jenna Freedman, reference & zine librarian at Barnard College, gives some tips on selecting a zine library to donate your zines to:
Proximity is a perfectly good reason to donate to a particular library. Give locally and all.
Another thing to do is to figure out what you want for your zines. If you want them to live a climate controlled acid-free life and to be made available for future scholarship, you would consider an academic library like mine.
If your main goal is for them to be easily available to the public, you'd select a public library like Salt Lake City, Cleveland, or Baltimore.
If you want them in a community library you could try the Zine Archive & Publishing Project in Seattle or the Denver Zine Library, among many others.
If you want your zines digitized and made available online, think about ZineLibrary.net or the Queer Zine Archive Project.
Beyond that, you can try to figure out what different libraries specialize in, so you can find your zines a home where they'll fit in. e.g. west coast zines to the West Coast Zine Collection or the San Francisco Public Library. Women's zines to Duke University or to Barnard. Anarchist zines to the Labadie Collection in Michigan and librarian zines to U. Wisconsin at Madison. But please, always ask first.
Anyway, when you get sick of moving boxes of zines from one six-floor walk-up to the next, please consider donating them to a library — any zine library. We've got your zines' best interests at heart and will take excellent care of them.
Contact Jenna — or donate your zine! — at Barnard College Library, 3009 Broadway, New York NY 10027; zines@barnard.edu; or visit zines.barnard.edu.
Visit our Zine Libraries page to find a zine library near you.