Events Calendar

Built around vivid imagery of a lost America, it will offer practical insights into the pressing questions that face contemporary archivists and archives.

How can past media transitions help us make more informed decisions in the future? Are we moving toward greater archival centralization, or are we entering a landscape where an unlimited number of collections flourish? How will personal and corporate/institutional collections influence and change one another? Are archives gearing their services and offerings toward classes of users that don’t really exist, while users seek archives that haven’t yet been created? What’s really new, and what just looks new?

Drawn from his popular Lost Landscapes events, Prelinger’s program will mix unusual and surprising archival images with a multimedia discussion that will address many unresolved issues now emerging as the digital turn brings history together with the future.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker. His collection of 60,000 ephemeral films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002. He has been an active player in the stock footage field since 1985, and his collection is now represented worldwide by Getty Images. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make 2,100 (soon to be 5,000) films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his new feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His Lost Landscapes projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit and elsewhere. Prelinger is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives and issues relating to archival access and regeneration. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library open to the public in downtown San Francisco.