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UK Libraries is the recent recipient of a 2026 Recordings at Risk grant from the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR). The program supports the preservation of rare and unique audio and audiovisual content of high scholarly value.
The Libraries’ project, “The Synanon Game: Preserving the Audio History of Counterculture Movements and Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation in the 1960s-1980s,” was awarded $53,533 to digitize, describe, and transfer 1,622 reel-to-reel audiotapes to a long-term digital preservation repository.
The audiotapes are part of the Rod Mullen Collection on Synanon, held at UK Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center, and consist of recorded meetings, gatherings, conversations, and lectures created by Synanon.
Originally established as an alcohol and drug rehabilitation program in Santa Monica, California in the late 1950s, Synanon developed into a new religious movement and alternative community that disbanded in 1991 following numerous controversies and criminal convictions.
The reel-to-reels faced tremendous risk of loss due to multiple intrinsic and external factors, and the grant will allow the Libraries to preserve these materials with national historic significance.
Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Recordings at Risk program has awarded $8.75 million between 2017 to 2026 to help cover the costs associated with preserving and reformatting fragile media content.
Explore more materials held by UK Libraries that document therapeutic communities in the United States. Pioneered in part by Synanon, therapeutic communities have been lauded as a promising social model for addiction recovery, but they have also been home to documented cases of therapeutic abuse.
