Prelinger Archives
The Prelinger Archives are a collection of films from American cultural history. Films are collected on the development of the American landscape, everyday life and social history. From 1982 to 2002 it was in New York City , since then in San Francisco .
history
The archive was founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982 to preserve “ephemeral” (short-lived) films: films sponsored by companies and organizations, educational films, amateur and private recordings. Typically, these films were made to serve specific purposes at specific times, and many today exist only by chance. About 65% of the archive's holdings are publicly available because their copyrights have expired or because they are US productions that were published without appropriate copyright notices.
The declared aim of the Prelinger Archive is to collect, preserve and make accessible films of historical importance that have not been collected elsewhere .
In 1999 the films in the Prelinger Archives were made available on the Internet Archive .
By 2001 it had acquired 60,000 completed films of various lengths and over 30,000 cans of uncut film. In 2002, the Library of Congress acquired the physical films that were held in the archives at the time. The archive donated approximately 65,000 cans of film to the Library of Congress, mostly industrial and educational titles. In the spring of 2015, the archive comprised around 8,000 video tapes and digital films, around 14,000 home videos and 1,000 industrial and advertising films that had been acquired since 2002.
Compared to other film archives, the Prelinger archive offers a relatively high level of public access to its collections. Over 6,400 public domain films are available for download in the Internet archive and can be reused without restriction on the Internet. All films in the archives can be licensed for production through Getty Images .
The Prelinger Archives are currently focused on collecting home and amateur films from North America.
