Donate to the Timothy Leary Digitization Project

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Timothy Leary was an inspiration and friend of bOING bOING from our earliest days. (Photo above of Tim with bOING bOING founders Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair in 1995; and with me in 1991.) Mark previously posted about the first glimpses of the Timothy Leary Archives available online, in the form of some fantastic videos. That's part of a much larger project to digitize all of Tim's archives and bring him to life in Cyberspace, one of his greatest wishes before he died in 1996. Now, the Timothy Leary Archives are seeking donations to help keep the momentum going. From Denis Berry, trustee of Tim's estate:

Timothy Leary was a visionary. Realizing the importance of the events of the day, he tenaciously saved records of each phase of his life, capturing not only the budding psychedelic movement and its history, but years later, trumpeting the coming of the digital age of personal computers when this concept was still foreign to most.

His archival collection contains over 500,000 documents, including hundreds of letters from luminaries of all kinds (Allan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Anton Wilson), documents from his Harvard research, Millbrook journals, IFIF documents, hundreds of hours of audio and video and thousands of photographs. This collection records not only his life, but the history of the entire psychedelic movement, and more.

Last week, at a huge reunion event in San Francisco, his estate announced their plans to digitize this collection and place it online as one of the first projects of its kind. Hosted by Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive, the site will eventually house the entire collection, and it will be completely searchable and indexed. Dr. Leary had this dream before most people even knew what the internet was, or how important it would become.

We invite you to visit to help support the digitization, by donating to help move the project forward.