The Prelinger Archives is a collection of

film A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

s relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

everyday life Everyday life, daily life or routine life comprises the ways in which people typically act, think, and feel on a daily basis. Everyday life may be described as mundane, routine, natural, habitual, or normal. Human diurnality means most peop ...

, and

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

. It was in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

from 1982 to 2002 and is now in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

History

The Archives were founded by

Rick Prelinger Rick Prelinger is an archivist, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by th ...

in 1982Audio
Richard and Megan Prelinger interview
at

KQED-FM KQED-FM (88.5 MHz) is a NPR-member radio station in San Francisco, California. Its parent organization is KQED Inc., which also owns its television partners, both of which are PBS member outlets: KQED (channel 9) and KQEH (channel 54). Studio ...

(NPR) (1 hour) to preserve what he calls "

ephemeral Ephemerality (from the Greek word , meaning 'lasting only one day') is the concept of things being transitory, existing only briefly. Academically, the term ephemeral constitutionally describes a diverse assortment of things and experiences, fr ...

" 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 The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

because their copyrights have expired, or because they were U.S. productions that were published without proper copyright notice.

Criteria

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 The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

acquired the physical films held in the Archives as of that date. The Archives made two subsequent donations to Library of Congress totalling some 65,000 cans of film, primarily industrial and educational titles. As of spring 2015, the Archives holds about 8,000 films in videotape and digital form, approximately 14,000 home movies, and 1,000 industrial and sponsored films acquired since 2002. Compared to many other moving-image archives, Prelinger Archives provides a relatively high level of public access to its collections. Over 6,400

films are available for download and unrestricted reuse on the Internet at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

. All the films in the archives can be licensed for production use through

Getty Images Getty Images Holdings, Inc. is an American visual media company and is a supplier of stock images, editorial photography, video and music for business and consumers, with a library of over 477 million assets. It targets three markets— creative ...

. Prelinger Archives currently focuses principally on collecting home movies and amateur film from North America.

Gallery

File:Perversion for Profit part 1.ogv, ''

Perversion for Profit ''Perversion for Profit'' is a 1963 Eastmancolor propaganda film financed by Charles Keating through Citizens for Decent Literature and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. The film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt youn ...

'' part 1 File:125th Street Ferry.jpg, The 125th Street Ferry in

from 1941. File:Yankee Stadium 1956.png,

Yankee Stadium Yankee Stadium is a baseball stadium located in the Bronx, New York City. It is the home field of the New York Yankees of Major League Baseball, and New York City FC of Major League Soccer. Opened in April 2009, the stadium replaced the origi ...

, 1956 screen capture

Notes

External links

*
pannix.com

Prelinger Library
*
Rick Prelinger interview - Spots Unknown
{{Authority control Film archives in the United States Public domain Library of Congress Organizations established in 1982 Audiovisual ephemera 1982 establishments in New York City Articles containing video clips Internet Archive collections