Ann Fitzpatrick ushers me into her Allston kitchen, which — even though it houses little more than a paint-flaking table, a crappy old PC, and a gorgeous Akita named Sydney — qualifies as an annex of the Fitzpatrick-curated institution known as the Rock and Roll Library. "I was just talking to Billy Bragg," she says. "He’s very sympathetic. Melissa Etheridge is going to be here tomorrow, we’re going to meet with her. The Grateful Dead, we talked to them yesterday, and they’re very supportive too."

The three-year-old Rock and Roll Library isn’t the lending kind with books — for now, at least, it comprises a Web site, various educational outreach programs, and Fitzpatrick’s administrative home office. Fitzpatrick and Sydney work from the kitchen while a gaggle of interns from Emerson and Northeastern toil at research, data entry, and Web-page construction in a crowded adjacent living room. But thanks to an eviction notice, the gig might soon be up. "I’ve lived here for six years," Fitzpatrick says. "I had a lease, it ran out after the first year, but I continued to pay rent. Now suddenly the landlord is saying I’m a tenant without a lease and we gotta go."

Its humble and endangered home notwithstanding, the RRL is an ambitious undertaking. Fitzpatrick’s vision is two-pronged. She and her volunteers are hard at work creating what she says will, once unveiled, be the most comprehensive popular-music database on the Web. She shows me some mock-up entries for the Dead and Jerry Garcia: they’re text-heavy and exhaustive, cross-referencing every band member, album, song, lyric, side project, tour, movie, book, and award — with links to even the musicians’ favorite charities. When the site goes live, she expects to have sound clips for most songs and "click-to-buy" links to, say, Amazon.com, which would give the RRL a percentage of each sale attracted through the site.

The money would help finance the real mission of the Rock and Roll Library, which is, as its Web site states, "promoting the use of popular music in education." Fitzpatrick’s goal is to bring rock to the classroom. This past April, the RRL brought Etheridge to a New Jersey high school to sing her elegy for Matthew Shepard, "Scarecrow," as a way to talk to kids about tolerance. But the RRL is also interested in more practical enterprises, such as using John Lennon’s "Imagine" as a jumping-off point for younger students’ poems and paintings.

"People have a personal relationship with music," Fitzgerald explains. "We use that relationship as a vehicle to educate. Popular music reflects our culture. And when you use that to teach kids, they’re far more receptive to learning."

But the business of refashioning rock and roll as education isn’t easy, and it ain’t cheap. "We need sponsorship and we need office space," Fitzgerald points out. If she can’t find a sizable chunk of cash and a more spacious base of operations soon, the Rock and Roll Library will be kaput.

What she dreams of is a library complex right on the Boston waterfront, "a place you can actually come and sit down and access the music-archive database. We’ll have some artifacts and stuff, and we also want to have a studio, for educational purposes." But that’s down the road a bit. Right now the RRL desperately needs a smallish office where Fitzpatrick and her volunteers can continue the work they’ve begun. So she’s hoping to inspire a few sympathetic believers to open their wallets — or, better, their lofts — to help the RRL stay afloat. She has no qualms about depending on the kindness of strangers. And so, stranger, ask yourself (as her hero the fat man once sang), "Are you kind?"

For more information about the Rock and Roll Library, or to make a donation, call (617) 779-8762,or visit www.rocklibrary.com.