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In 2004, Julie Bartel, who assembled the Salt Lake City collection, published a resource for fellow librarians titled "From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library." Bartel's book offered the basics for starting an archive, but as the search for and preservation of zines became more professional, so too have the librarians' concerns.

Some of these issues seem fairly mundane to those on the "customer" side of the reference desk. But for a librarian, thoughtful and thorough categorization ensures that an item will find its destined reader. For example, is a zine a serial or a monograph? (Related: can it be a serial if it only comes out at the zinester's whim?)

The answer to the serial vs. monograph question determines where a given zine appears in the catalog, and how detailed an abstract accompanies its listing. Consider Rollerderby, a popular zine by Lisa Carver that is available at Barnard. If categorized as a serial, its inscrutable title and author line reveal little about its contents. If each issue is categorized as an individual monograph, then a catalog search would reveal that Issue 24 promises coverage of four somewhat disparate topics: "Cat Power, capitalism, T.S. Eliot and cats."

This dovetails with a decades-old movement called "radical cataloging," which represents an effort to rethink how an institution like the Library of Congress determines the searchable and supposedly neutral subject headings one can assign a given text. While this seems innocuous enough, most zines defy the largely outdated language of preexistent headings and run the risk of invisibility during standard, heading-driven archive searches.

Freedman maintains a tally of examples detailing the disconnect between zines and Library of Congress terminology. Most offer reminders of how the peripheral, personal-is-political vantage of zines might challenge everyday language or culture. Zines by people who have been raped are automatically assigned to the heading "Rape Victims," even though the zine authors' preferred term, "rape survivor," suggests a productive and empowered post-traumatic existence.

Freedman recounts a more lighthearted example of a zine titled Boobs, Boobs the Musical Fruit that she wanted to place under the heading, "Having Large Breasts." Instead, she had to settle for the Library of Congress' preferred heading: "Breasts -- Social Aspects."

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