Library of the Printed Web is a curatorial project organized around artists who use screen capture, image grab, site scrape and search query to create printed matter from content found on the web. LotPW includes self-published artists' books, photo books, texts and other print works articulating the casual concept of "search, compile and publish."

Artists featured in LotPW drive through vast landscapes of data to collect and transform digital information, visual and otherwise, into analog experience; every work in the collection is a printed expression of search engine pattern discovery. Many of the works in LotPW share common production and publishing techniques (e.g., print-on-demand), even as the content itself varies widely.

I've assembled this set of materials because I see evidence of a strong, emerging web-to-print-based artistic practice based on the search engine and other algorithmic operations; as this view matures, the inventory of LotPW may grow to reflect new concepts and methodologies.

Rather than draw boundaries or define a new aesthetic with LotPW, I posit this presentation of printed artifacts as a reference tool for studying shifting relationships between the web (as culture), the artist (as archivist) and print publishing (as a new/old self-serve schema for expressing the archive).

Library of the Printed Web exists both as a physical collection of book works and as an online representation of these works. The permanent collection is based in Long Island City, NY and includes one copy of each item in the inventory, except where noted. LotPW launched as a table-top presentation at Theorizing the Web, CUNY Graduate Center, 1–2 March 2013.