ABSTRACT
Rick Prelinger (https://www.prelinger.com), an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded the Prelinger Archives in 1982. This collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,500 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading, and reuse. With the Voyager Company, a pioneer new-media publisher, he produced 14 laserdiscs and CD-ROMs 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 Keller Easterling). Rick has taught in the MFA Design program at New York’s School of Visual Arts and lectured widely on American cultural and social history and issues of cultural and intellectual property access. He sat on the National Film Preservation Board (2002-2005) as a representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is currently Board President of the Internet Archive. His feature-length film Panorama Ephemera, depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, premiered in summer 2004. He is the co-founder (with Megan Shaw Prelinger) of the Prelinger Library (https://www.prelingerlibrary.org), an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco.
Maybe we could start by discussing the notion of “ephemeral films”?
