The International Dada Archive

Posted by Fabio 10 May 2010

Beautiful Archive of Dada publications gathered by the University of Iowa. The Archive includes materials in all formats that have been cataloged for the collection, including books, essays in books, periodical articles, manuscripts, sound and videorecordings, and other media related to the Dada movement and to the individual dadaists.

These materials are located throughout the University of Iowa Libraries, but are primarily housed in the Main Library and the Art Library. Most of the manuscript holdings are on microfilms that were made in various public and private collections in Europe and North America in the early 1980s, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Jerome Foundation.

In addition to the on-line catalog, the International Dada Archive has a card catalog comprising the approximately 47,000 titles that were cataloged prior to March 1999. This catalog may be consulted at the Archive’s office in the Main Library building. The on-line catalog includes all materials cataloged for the Dada Archive since February 1999 as well as a substantial portion of the materials cataloged prior to that date. With the assistance of a University of Iowa Arts and Humanities Initiative grant, as of September 2000 approximately 60 percent of the titles in the card catalog have been entered in the Online International Bibliography of Dada. This effort will continue until the conversion of the card catalog is complete. The International On-line Bibliography of Dada is maintained as a database within the University of Iowa’s on-line system, InfoHawk.


The Digital Dada Library provides links to scanned images of original Dada-era publication in the International Dada Archive. These books, pamphlets, and periodicals are housed in the Special Collections Department of The University of Iowa Libraries. For reasons of copyright, only documents in the public domain have been included.

The International Dada Archive