Rick Prelinger is an

archivist An archivist is an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to Document, records and archives determined to have long-term value. The records maintained by an archivist c ...

, professor at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

; writer and filmmaker, and founder of the

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. It was in New York City from 1982 to 2002 and is now in San Francisco. History The ...

, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by 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 ...

in 2002 after 20 years' operation. Rick has partnered with 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, ...

to make over 6,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the

Voyager Company The Voyager Company was a pioneer in CD-ROM production in the 1980s and early 1990s. In partnership with Janus Films, the company published The Criterion Collection, a pioneering home video collection of classic and important contemporary films on ...

, a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen

LaserDisc The LaserDisc (LD) is a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium, initially licensed, sold and marketed as DiscoVision, MCA DiscoVision (also known simply as "DiscoVision") in the United States in 1978. Its diam ...

s and

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

s with material from his archives, including ''Ephemeral Films,'' the ''Our Secret Century'' series and ''Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built,'' a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning (co-produced with architect Keller Easterling). For Prelinger, "archives are a primary weapon against amnesia."

Life

Prelinger worked at

The Comedy Channel The Comedy Channel (promoted on air as comedy) is a defunct Australian subscription television channel available on Foxtel, and Optus Television. The channel ceased broadcasting on 1 September 2020. History A joint venture between Artist Servi ...

from its startup in 1989 until it merged with the comedy network HA! to become

Comedy Central Comedy Central is an American basic cable channel owned by Paramount Global through its network division's MTV Entertainment Group unit, based in Manhattan. The channel is geared towards young adults aged 18–34 and carries comedy programming ...

. He then worked at

Home Box Office Home Box Office (HBO) is an American premium television network, which is the flagship property of namesake parent subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is ba ...

until 1995. Prelinger has taught in the MFA design program at New York's

School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts New York City (SVA NYC) is a private for-profit art school in New York City. It was founded in 1947 and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. History This school was started by ...

and lectures widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access. He sat (2001–2004) on the

National Film Preservation Board The United States National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) is the board selecting films for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. It was established by the National Film Preservation Act of 1988. The National Film Regis ...

as representative of the

Association of Moving Image Archivists The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, ...

, was Board President of the

San Francisco Cinematheque San Francisco Cinematheque is a San Francisco-based film society for artist-made cinema. It was created in 1961 by a group of filmmakers, including Bruce Baillie and Chick Strand. This screening program grew into Canyon Cinema before being split ...

(2002–2007), and is a board member of the

and a professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media at

UC Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge of ...

. His feature-length film ''Panorama Ephemera'' opened in summer 2004. With spouse Megan Prelinger he is co-founder of the

Prelinger Library The Prelinger Library is a privately funded public library in San Francisco founded in 2004 and operated by Megan Prelinger and Rick PrelingerAudioRichard and Megan Prelingerinterview at KQED-FM (NPR) (1 hour) It holds over 50,000 books, period ...

, a reference library located 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 ...

, California. He has produced such archival compilation films ''Lost Landscapes of San Francisco'' (15 annual films, 2006–2020) and ''Lost Landscapes of Detroit'' (three films, 2010–2012 and a fourth and fifth, "Yesterday and Tomorrow in Detroit", 2014 and 2015.) He received the

Creative Capital Creative Capital is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in New York City that supports artists across the United States through funding, counsel, gatherings, and career development services. Since its founding in 1999, Creative Capital has commi ...

Award in 2012 to make the film ''No More Road Trips?,'' which premiered in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

, at

South by Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...

in March 2013. He wrote ''The Field Guide to Sponsored Films'' (2007) which "describes 452 historically or culturally significant motion pictures commissioned by businesses, charities, advocacy groups, and state or local government units between 1897 and 1980." It is available as a book and as a free PDF from the

National Film Preservation Foundation The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) is an independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. Growing from a national planning effort led by the Library of Congress, the NFPF began op ...

. He worked at the Internet Archive on a texts-digitization project and helped organize the

Open Content Alliance The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California ...

References

External links

Interview/podcast on the future of archives and issues relating to access to archives and culture (2011)Interview with Spots UnknownPrelinger.comblackoystercatcher, Rick Prelinger's blogPrelinger Collection

Prelinger Library
*
Panorama Ephemera
' *
Panorama Ephemera
' published in the Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, Volume 2 Issue 1 (Ephemera).
''The Field Guide to Sponsored Films''Prelinger's "Reimagining the Archive" presentation at UCLA, November 2010''Lost Landscapes of Detroit,'' 2010
at Internet Archive * {{DEFAULTSORT:Prelinger, Rick 1953 births Living people American archivists American film directors University of California, Santa Cruz faculty American male writers Internet Archive collectors

Life

See also

References

External links