Kelly fills out a receipt

Originally uploaded by Colorado College Tutt Library.

Two weeks ago, my colleagues Lisa and Jessy and I drove up to Denver to visit the Denver Zine Library. The three of us have put together the Colorado College Zine Collection, a collection of zines from Colorado and other western states (not California or Oregon, though; we’d go broke trying to collect the output of those two states). The collection is still pretty small, but growing in fits and starts. (Check out this link if you are wondering what’s a zine?)

Kelly, a zine librarian who does the excellent zine “Shortandqueer” and who sometimes goes by the nom de zine “Kelly Shortandqueer,” was nice enough to meet us at the Zine Library on a weekday morning; normally they are only open on weekend afternoons.

I didn’t quite know what to expect going in. I knew the library had been around for a few years and must have a pretty good sized collection of zines. But I wasn’t prepared for just how great this little library would be.

Their website says they have about 7,000 zines, and from the photoset you can see that they are arranged neatly by subject and size, and shelved in cardboard boxes (many of which are cut-down cereal boxes). Kelly showed us how things are organized on the shelves, the new donations they still need to process, the circulation system, the reshelving crate, and all the other good stuff that makes up a library.

The library catalog is maintained in an Access database on a PC at the library and periodically dumped on the web in HTML. It sounds like Kelly isn’t thrilled with that, but it works well enough for now. Kelly isn’t trained as a librarian, but he says that a few degreed librarians have recently started volunteering, and it sounds like he will have plenty of work for them to do in refining some of the organization of the collection.

It was great fun to see the Denver Zine Library. We bought a few zines and DZL pins (sadly, they were out of the logo underwear) and I bought a few zines from their duplicates grab-bag (so far, at least one of those shots-in-the-dark has turned out to be a really good zine). The whole thing runs on donations and volunteers so if you have zines or dollars or hours of your time to spare, the Denver Zine Library could put them to good use.