The Barnard Zine Library collects zines written by women (cis- and transgender) with an emphasis on works by women of color. The zines are personal and political publications on activism, anarchism, body image, third wave feminism, gender, parenting, queer community, riot grrrl, sexual assault, trans experience, and other topics.

Barnard is a women's college affiliated with Columbia University.

 The Barnard Zine Library concentrates on marginalized voices and subjects. What is the importance of zines in making those voices heard?

We try to get these voices out there to a wider audience because a lot of times they can act as entry points for greater discussion. Being at a women’s college and focusing just on zines by girls and women, for instance, allows us to explore these often over-generalized groups in a nuanced way. We get a lot of zines looking at the intersections of identities and a lot about breaking societal expectations, whether that’s in your identity group (e.g., mixed race, queer femme) or in society as a whole.

People can get exposed to these ideas and, as I have, take them as a form of comfort that they are not alone in their thoughts and it can push them to bring those ideas out of the zine library and into their dorm rooms, into their classes, and into their daily lives.

What kind of response have you received?

I think we have generally been well accepted, and sometimes enthusiastically so. There’s always an underlying question of “why zines?” in keeping up an archive of this material. People either think zines have gone out because of the Internet or that they’re too contemporary to be of any real value.

But zines are not dead, just evolving. For instance, we just hosted an event in collaboration with the POC Zine Project and For the Birds Collective called Meet Me at the Race Riot: People of Color in Zines from 1990 to the Present (video) that boasted attendance of 80-100 people. The message from that event is that interest in zines is alive and well, and no longer confined to singular exchanges between zinesters. There is a larger energy around zines as a method of self-expression that continues to make people want to reach out and want to create, and our library helps people to be introduced to many ways of doing that.

Have you ever stumbled upon something surprising in Barnard's zine collection?

"Surprising" is such a relative term for me now - it’s hard to think about what would throw me for a loop in our collection. I guess I’m always surprised by the younger authors in the collection, like the 4-year-old children making zines with their parents and the 14-year-old comic book artist who has already used her zines to win awards (jealous!).

These are surprising, I think, because my view of how people get into zines is a bit ageist/stereotypical - it involves angsty teenagers and misunderstood academics who are frustrated by the system and thus they start writing out their thoughts in zine form. It’s refreshing to see that people can get into zines from such an early age and have a completely different relationship to them than I have or that other zinesters I know have.

Zines are generally handmade and susceptible to wear. What goes into preserving Barnard's collection?

The Barnard zine collection is split into two parts: the archive and the library stacks. We try to get two copies of each zine so that we have a copy in both locations (though sometimes that doesn’t work out depending on where the zines are sourced from). In the archive, the zines are not handled very often and are put acid-free boxes in a room that is a little dungeon-esque in that it is in the basement, but it is a climate-controlled environment, which is what's important.

The stacks copies are a little more wanton because people handle them all the time and check them out. They're even mailed out for interlibrary loan, but they are generally respected as one would respect a book in the library. The smaller zines are also put in comic book bags with a cardstock backing to keep them from being lost or falling apart.

How has your job, and the material you work with, inspired your own projects?

I have drawn inspiration from all the different ways zines are put together - when I was starting out, my zines were stapled booklets, but now I’ve gotten really interested in how to make folded no-staple zines and sewing zines in order to bind them, et cetera. There’s really a great range in our collection.

Also, I think that the content of these zines provokes me to be more daring with my own content; while we don’t share the same stories, sometimes the themes that are in the zines are provocative enough to make me think, “Hey, why don’t I try writing about fatphobia / childhood / being a queer person / race / arts and crafts / nerdiness?” It’s very eye-opening to see how many different stories there are to be told and in how many different ways they can be expressed

What can people expect to find on your table at the Brooklyn Zine Fest?

They can find the Barnard Zine Library Zine, which is an overview of our collection materials, where we are, and how we work. They will also find Sticks and Stones, which is the Barnard Zine Club’s series of zines, as well as Cite This Zine (pdf), and works by the zine librarian and student workers.

Answers provided by Jordan Alam (Zine Assistant, Barnard '14) and edited lightly by Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman.