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August 20, 2010
Nell Taylor on the Chicago Underground Library
A typical Chicago Underground Library (CUL) volunteer meeting starts something like this: New volunteers arrive for orientation at 6:30pm, some a little late because they got lost in the 100-year old parish house where we occupy the lobby of a fringe theater company on the second floor. When we have a critical mass of new people, anywhere from 3-7 a month, I try to explain the project as briefly as possible.
A Community-Based Approach to Collecting and Cataloging
CUL is a replicable model for community archives that accepts every piece of print media from a certain area without making quality or importance judgments, going back as far in history as possible. That means we collect university press, handmade artist books, zines made by sixth graders, poetry chapbooks from big names published in tiny local presses, and self-published poetry chapbooks sold for a dollar on the street. We have neighborhood newspapers, internationally-renowned magazines of political commentary, and three View-Master reels of Chicago hot dog stands, neon signs, and motor inns, respectively.
We catalog items by everyone who contributed--writers, editors, typesetters, photographers, interns--and link those people together in our catalog so that users can trace the connections between contributors as they move from one publication to the next. We're building new cataloging software that we eventually hope to provide free of charge to jumpstart other collections. When other cities replicate the model, we'll be able to track the origin and migration of these ideas from city to city through individuals. Our new catalog and website will be up within the next two months.
We've been doing this for close to five years and have accumulated over 2,000 publications. We consider anything intended for public consumption to be "published," so while our collection is very broad, we draw the line at correspondence or personal journals. Geography is fluid, though. Connections between the publications are more important than strict regional boundaries. Someday we want to collect audio and video, too, but we'd need a pretty serious operating budget to do that and at least one full-time employee. Having only been incorporated for a year and receiving just last week an anonymous donation to cover our 501c3 filing, we still have a little way to go before we get there. Our volunteers are the heart and soul and brains and heavy lifters (figuratively and-- when you have boxes of books involved-- literally) of our organization.
Posted by claadmin at 10:51 AM