History (and Future) of the Project
Why We Built This Library
The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents located in San Francisco, California, USA.Though libraries live on (and are among the least-corrupted democratic institutions), the freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer. Now that many research libraries are economizing on space and converting print collections to microfilm and digital formats, it's becoming harder to wander and let the shelves themselves suggest new directions and ideas. Key academic and research libraries are often closed to unaffiliated users, and many keep the bulk of their collections in closed stacks, inhibiting the rewarding pleasures of browsing. Despite its virtues, query-based online cataloging often prevents unanticipated yet productive results from turning up on the user's screen. And finally, much of the material in our collection is difficult to find in most libraries readily accessible to the general public.
Most important of all, people wishing to copy library holdings for research and transformative use often face difficulties in making legitimate copies. Since the act of quoting and recontextualizing existing words and images is indistinguishable from making new ones, we think it's important for libraries to build appropriation-friendly access into their charters, and we're trying to take a big first step in this direction.
We are interested in exploring how libraries with specialized, unique, and arcane collections such as ours can exist and flourish outside protected academic environments and be made available to people working outside of those environments, especially artists, activists and independent scholars.
We plan at first to open our library to others when we are there, and develop a model of service based on what we learn of other people's needs. It will be an appropriation-friendly setting. Scanners, digital cameras, and CD/DVD burners will be available so that visitors can make digital copies of items of interest and take them home. There will be no charge for using the collections, though we are exploring charging for commercial reuse of the materials so as to recover some of our expenses.
What's in the collection?
Some of its strengths include:
- The North American landscape; material about people and place, cultural geography, rural and urban geography, travel and tourism, highways and car culture, parks and recreation
- housing (building, design, and decoration), city planning, architecture, infrastructure
- natural history; cultural relationships to nature
- the history of industry, manufacturing, and extraction of raw materials
- media and technology: extensive collection on the history of radio, TV, nontheatrical motion pictures, telephones, networking, electricity
- advertising, marketing and consumerism
- thousands of maps
- an extensive collection of outdated (and beautifully illustrated) school textbooks (1880-1970) in fields like social studies, home economics, science, and history, all redolent with the ideologies of their time
- regional, urban, social, and cultural history
- an extensive collection of government documents, including 19th-century primary materials on Native Americans; agricultural and wildlife publications; materials on rivers, forests and highways; the Official Gazette of the Patent Office (1872-1980); Congressional hearings and reports on crime, youth, dissent, immigration, the civil rights movement, the Atomic Energy Commission, veterans' issues, and labor; planning reports; and thousands of US Geological Survey maps and monographs
- radical and labor history
- the history of ephemeral and nontheatrical film (surprise!)
- over 500 runs of periodicals, both mainstream and obscure, including regional historical journals; American City; American Planning and Civic Annual; Public Ownership; American Municipalities; Geographical Review; Greater New York; Survey and Survey Graphic; Graphis; Cry California; Condor; The Lamp; The Annals: Proceedings from the Political Science Association; Rural Sociology; Signs; Black Scholar; Ms.; the Economist; The Nation; Unpopular Review; Electrical West; Schism; Advocate of Peace; FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin; Display World; Mill and Factory; Soviet Woman; Life; Look; Fortune; the Militant; Coronet; Park & Cemetery; Through the Ages; Builder; Uranium; Iron Age; Good Housekeeping; Good Roads; Social Hygiene; Full Cry; Bell System Technical Journal; Broadcasting; Coronet; Bus Transportation; Inland Printer; Advertising & Selling; Candy Manufacturers and Confectioners Journal; Modern Packaging; and many, many more.
- -- and much, much more. For more about what's in the library and how its subjects are arranged, see Megan's essay On the Organization of the Prelinger Library.
