Dr. Laura LaPlaca

Dr. Laura LaPlaca is Director of the National Comedy Center’s Carl Reiner Department of Archives & Preservation, the United States’ congressionally-designated repository for comedy history and the first cultural institution dedicated to preserving the vital story of comedy. She is a pop culture historian, archivist, and curator with over ten years of experience leading cultural heritage projects with museums, libraries, private clients, and universities. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists.

Laura oversees acquisition, conservation, research, and exhibition of the National Comedy Center’s archival collections and has collaborated with dozens of artists and estates to preserve materials that represent comedy’s great contributions to our culture: from Charlie Chaplin’s cane, Lucille Ball’s polka-dotted dress, and Lenny Bruce’s court transcripts to Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show  monologues, scripts from the Saturday Night Live  writers’ room, and George Carlin’s 27,000-piece archive of creative papers.

MuseumNext Digital Collections Summit
Monday, 10 October 2022

Interactive Archival “Reading Rooms” at the National Comedy Center

Learn how the United States’ first archive and cultural institution dedicated to comedy’s history is presenting 1000s of never-before-seen creative papers, clips, photos, and artefacts using interactive storytelling platforms to teach its visitors about the artform of comedy and the process of crafting a joke. We’ll share lots of laughs as we demonstrate some of the cutting-edge tools and techniques employed by our archivists and storytellers, with the goal of allowing all visitors to digitally experience the sense of discovery and self-directed learning that comes with visiting a traditional reading room.

Find the full schedule here