LYNN BOOK PROJECTS ARCHIVE
The Lynn Book Projects Archive (LBPA) is an evolving online portal to digitized artifacts from the artist's 45-year corpus of experimental projects and research at the intersection of arts, culture, change.
LBPA currently has 2,000+ digitized artifacts out of almost 10,000 which, over time, will be added to the online portal. The project launched with a Mellon Foundation award through the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University (WFU), North Carolina, U.S., to stimulate innovative digital scholarship. Beginning in 2017-18, a recent graduate of WFU instigated the initial process of creating an inventory of Book’s physical archive of video, film, photo documentation and more. A team of researchers from the emerging Digital Scholarship Center at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, WFU, provided the institutional platform. Other contributors from Special Collections and the multimedia lab at Wake Forest provided essential time and resources. Several students and alumni have been critical to the process of digitizing and preserving Lynn Book’s oeuvre and have actively engaged with envisioning possibilities for how the work gets discovered and activated through an online searchable database.
Hear a Podcast/Discussion about the Creation of LBPA
Book’s work is also included in other archives around the country, such as the Randolph Street Gallery Archives (Special Collections, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Library), Roulette Intermedium (New York) and PennSound (University of Pennsylvania). Another such archive, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in Chicago, holds several appearances by Book, who was also part of the organization’s history by serving on their Board of Directors in the early 1990s. ESS recently resurfaced an audio documentation of Book’s performance of the renowned 1929 Dada text-score with Andy Laties (Book also provides commentary).