Saved and preserved over decades, the Bob Dylan Archive is the personal collection of the Nobel Prize–winning songwriter, documenting his career from the early 1960s through the present day.
Tactile, tangible and deeply intimate, the archive pulls back the curtain on Dylan’s creative process — revealing his indefatigable work ethic, his relentless commitment to craft and his inability to stay in the same place for very long.
Acquired by the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016, The Bob Dylan Archive® is Bob Dylan’s personal collection of materials saved over the course of his seven-decade-and-counting career. With more than 100,000 items, the archive contains thousands of manuscript drafts, hundreds of notebooks and notepads, tens of thousands of photographs, hundreds of hours of video and film footage, many hundreds of letters, postcards, telegrams and faxes, as well as countless hours of studio, rehearsal and live recordings.
Housed in the Bob Dylan Center's Douglas and Anne Brinkley Reading Room, the archive is open to researchers by appointment only, and has supported scholarly work across multiple disciplines including popular music, film studies, American history, folklore, religious studies, sociology, political science and cultural studies.
The archive is arranged into twelve series. Here's what researchers will find across the collection.
Research at the Bob Dylan Archive® takes place in the reading room at the Bob Dylan Center, by appointment only.
Research appointments require at least one-month notice. The archive cannot accommodate unannounced researchers or walk-ins.
Monday – Friday, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. The reading room is open to approved researchers on Mondays and Tuesdays even when the Woody Guthrie Center is closed to the public.
