Resource of the Week: Prelinger Archives
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
Warning! Time sink alert!
I'm not really sure how long it would take to to view all 2,000+ films in this collection, housed at the Internet Archive, but this site is really like a bag of potato chips. You can't consume just one.
Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Getty Images represents the collection for stock footage sale, and almost 2,000 key titles are available here. As a whole, the collection currently contains over 10% of the total production of ephemeral films between 1927 and 1987, and it may be the most complete and varied collection in existence of films from these poorly preserved genres.
Where to start? You could do worse than browsing the list of "Most Downloaded Items Last Week" on the righthand side of the page. Near the top of the list you'll almost always find the 1951 Cold War classic, "Duck and Cover" - "Famous Civil Defense film for children in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of atomic attack." The entire "Atomic-nuclear: Civil defense" category is a fascinating look at a slice of American history. Icing on the cake -- reviews posted by users, the vast majority of whom seem to be intelligent and articulate, unlike the general viewing audience at...well, YouTube. BTW, a longer list of Most Dowloaded items is available by clicking the "More" link. Further down on the righthand side, you can browse "Most Downloaded Items Last Month," "Most Downloaded Items" (ever), and "Staff Picks." ("Duck and Cover" is present on every one of these lists.)
Another interesting way of browsing here is via the ginormous tag cloud. You're all but guaranteed to stumble onto some delightful serendipitous finds; I fished out the following half dozen jewels at random:
+ Trees to Tribunes (1937): "How newspapers are produced, beginning in the forest."
+ Who's Boss? (1950): "Husband and wife struggle to attain a balance of power in their marriage. This neorealist social guidance film was directed by Alexander Hammid."
+ 6 1/2 Magic Hours (1958): "The comfort and delight of transatlantic air travel at the beginning of the jet age."
+ Holiday from Rules? (1959): "'Lord of the Flies' from an adult's point of view, starring four willful and confused children.
+ Motivation and Reward in Learning (1948): "Uses white rats to picture trial-and-error problem solving and to demonstrate the importance of motivation and reward in the learning process."
+ Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957): "Sales film for voting machines, promoting them as engines of governmental efficiency and practical democracy."
We think that teachers and public speakers in particular will find much useful content here; everything is available under the Creative Commons Public Domain license. Which, not surprisingly, has led to a related collection, Prelinger Archive Mashups.
What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born!
Here’s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites. If you have a video you created using footage from the Prelinger Archives, please let us know so we can include it here.
The archive is also keyword searchable, and most of these films are available for streaming or download in a variety of formats. You can also view a series of thumbnails for each movie if you don't want to commit to watching the entire film.
But if you're a librarian, like both of your editors, you should definitely watch this one.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
