The Prelinger Library is a privately funded
public library
A public library is a library, most often a lending library, that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also Civil servic ...
in
San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...
founded in 2004 and operated by
Megan Prelinger and
Rick Prelinger[Audio]
Richard and Megan Prelinger
interview at KQED-FM
KQED-FM (88.5 MHz) is a listener-supported, non-commercial public radio station in San Francisco, California. It is simulcast on KQEI-FM (89.3 MHz) in the Sacramento metropolitan area. The parent organization is KQED Inc., which also owns tw ...
(NPR) (1 hour) It holds over 50,000 books, periodicals and pieces of print ephemera.
[ Prelinger Library considers itself a "hybrid library"][ that blurs the distinction between digital and non-digital; as of 2009 it had over 3,700 e-books online.][
The library is usually open one and one-half days a week, and hosts approximately 1,000 visitors per year.
]
Collection
The library is unusual in that it uses a custom system of organization designed by Megan that intends to facilitate and emphasize browsing. For example, the section on "Suburbia" is next to the section on "Domestic Environments", then "Architecture", which becomes "Graphic Design", which in turn leads to "Typography" and "Fine Arts", and then "Advertising" and "Sales". There is no Dewey Decimal Classification
The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) (pronounced ) colloquially known as the Dewey Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. ...
system or card catalog.
The library was inspired in part by the Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London in central London, England. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture – cros ...
Library in London, founded by German art historian Aby Warburg
Aby Moritz Warburg (June 13, 1866 – October 26, 1929) was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the ''Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg'' (Warburg Library for Cultural Studies), a private library, which was later m ...
. His disciple Fritz Saxl wrote: "The overriding idea was that the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbors—should by their titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history." Warburg built his library to find connections and relationships between antiquity and the Renaissance. Likewise, the Prelingers' library in part addresses the relationships among intellectual property, the evolution of media and cultural production.
Prelinger is a "serendipity" library,[ a library that emphasizes the experience of browsing and discovering things that were formerly unknown.][ The library can also be seen as a counterbalance to modern public libraries, which, as part of digital-library initiatives, emphasize computers and databases and are no longer a "mere warehouse for books".][ Megan Prelinger said the library is "a local workshop, not an institution. We serve tea, and we encourage photography and scanning and any other form of non-destructive appropriation. That kind of environment is very natural to people in the millennial generation and people who have grown up during the resurgence of craft and DIY spaces."]
See also
* Prelinger Archives
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. Originally based in New York City from 1982 through 2002, it is now based in San Franci ...
Notes
Further reading
"Classificationist as Author: The Case of the Prelinger Library"
by Melanie Feinberg (PDF). Paper to be presented at International Society for Knowledge Organization conference, Montreal, August 2008.
Megan Prelinger interview
at Radio Web MACBA
Radio is the technology of telecommunication, communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 3 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transm ...
(2015) (Podcast/audio: 40 min)
External links
*
Digitized books from Prelinger Library
at Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
{{Authority control
Public libraries in California
Private libraries in the United States
Libraries in San Francisco
2004 establishments in California
Libraries established in 2004