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 ...

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 PrelingerAudio
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

Free Speech Fear Free at Prelinger Library

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."

Notes

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

Collection

See also

Notes

Further reading

External links