Rick Prelinger, an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 2,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the Voyager Company, a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen 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. 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 on issues of cultural and intellectual property access. He sits on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is Board President of the Internet Archive and also the San Francisco Cinematheque. His feature-length film "Panorama Ephemera," depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004. He is co-founder of the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco.
