Safety is everybody’s business.
Rick Prelinger is an American archivist, filmmaker, writer, and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, best known for founding the Prelinger Archives, a vast collection of advertising, educational, industrial, government, and amateur films. Beginning in the early 1980s, he systematically rescued “ephemeral” films that were never meant to be saved, building a collection of tens of thousands of titles that the Library of Congress acquired in 2002, while he continued to expand and digitize the archive independently. He partnered with the Internet Archive to put thousands of these films online for free viewing and reuse, making him a key figure in open-access moving-image culture. With his spouse Megan Prelinger, he co‑founded the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, an appropriation‑friendly research library focused on media, technology, landscape, and social history. As a filmmaker, he creates archival‑based works such as “Panorama Ephemera” and the “Lost Landscapes” series, which remixes home movies and found footage into live, participatory screenings where audiences help narrate urban history from below.
