Prelinger Archives
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Prelinger Archives is a collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life and social history. It was physically located in New York City from 1982-2002 and is now in San Francisco.
The Archives was founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982 in order to preserve what he calls "ephemeral" films: films sponsored by corporations and organizations, educational films, and amateur and home movies. Typically, ephemeral films were produced to fulfill specific purposes at specific times, and many exist today only by chance or accident. About 65% of the Archive's holdings are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired, or because they were U.S. productions that were published without proper copyright notice.
The stated goal of the Prelinger Archives is to "collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere."
By 2001 it had acquired 60,000 completed films of varying lengths and over 30,000 cans of unedited film. In 2002, the Library of Congress acquired the contents of the Archives as of that date. As of autumn 2008, the Archives holds about 4,000 films on video and as digital files and over 50,000 cans of film acquired since the Library of Congress transaction, much of which will be donated to the Library of Congress in 2009.
Compared to many other moving image archives, Prelinger Archives provides a relatively high level of public access to its collections. Approximately 2,000 public domain films are available for download and unrestricted reuse on the Internet at the Internet Archive, and 500 additional films will be made available in 2008-2009. All the films in the archives can be licensed for production use through Getty Images.
Prelinger Archives and its sister organization Prelinger Library participate in the Open Content Alliance.
Trivia
- Footage from the archives was used for Weird Al Yankovic's music video, "Pancreas", and the Peak Oil documentary The End of Suburbia.
