The Prelinger Archive was established in 1983 by a man named Rick Prelinger and within 20 years he acquired over 60,000 films. Most of these were ephemeral films produced as advertisements or educational films, some are just amateur works. These films were digitized for scholarly use and to prohibit the loss of history as these films slowly deteriorate and/or just vanish over time. The Internet Archive is the platform on which the Prelinger Collection stands on. Created for similar reasons, the Internet Archive bridges the near past with the present by preserving different works of media to be viewed by a scholarly audience as well. In 2002 the Prelinger film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress and all that remains of the original 60,000 film library is now down to 4,000. The Prelinger Library is located in San Fransisco and the Prelinger Archive contains over 2,000 films all within the public domain for anyone to view whenever they chose.
Collection Principles
They digitized what they believed to be the most important and defined films within their collection. They probably gave special attention to the films that were receiving the most use over a period of time, in order to prevent any further damage to the films as they were. They digitized the pieces of film that seemed to most relevant to the purpose of the Prelinger Archive, to further research and scholarly thought on media art, history, and science. The collection is all within public domain according to the website, so the digitization of the films is not prohibited. In fact the website actually encourages you to make each of the films your own, in a sense, reproducing incorporating, or enhancing them as you see fit. It's a really beautiful thing.
Object Characteristics
Each of the 2,012 films seem to be available in a wide array of formats, making them very accessible to the public. MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 and others are file formats for the videos. The films themselves are viewable, and at the mid-range of file size appears to have nice resolution, but if blown up, loses much of that visibility. The objects themselves have unique identifiers. It is a little unfortunate that a collection of this size does not label their assets better. It seems to be very easy to contact Rick Prelinger as the need appears to someone in search of a specific film. another interesting feature is the thumbnail clips from the films themselves, I thought this a very nice touch for someone just looking to browse through public domain stills. Although, the images themselves are not the best quality.
Metadata
I found this to be a particularly interesting aspect of the site. On the home page for the Prelinger Archives there is an option to view the keywords for the 2,000 odd films in the collection in a tag cloud, very cool! Some of the biggest ones are consumerism, cold war and social guidance. I really enjoyed looking at this feature. So really the only ways to search within the archive is by keyword or title. So the site is a bit lacking in its ability to appease a scholarly audience. I believe that they should employ some sort of a database to create explicitness in their holdings.
Intended Audience
The site states that its intended audience is a scholarly one, but I am sure they bring many different peoples. They offer a lot for its users to navigate and interact with their site with, like their commenting and reviewing section as well as a bookmarking option. Both of these really helps make this site feel more like a community. I fear that not every scholarly person would be able to find what they are looking for when encountering this site, it is unfortunate, but the metadata needs a lot of work to create a more accessible place for people to really learn from.
1 comment:
You're right about two major issues -- intended audience and metadata. Most of our users are members of the public, which I personally think it great -- it's generally very hard for ordinary people to access moving image collections, and even harder for them to get hold of material that they can reedit themselves. Our reviews and annotations overwhelmingly come from nonacademic people, and though I have no problem with that, I've often thought we could do well by creating a portal (into the same content) for scholars and educators.
As for metadata, yes, you can only search the metadata that appears on the film detail pages. As time goes on, I hope IA works out ways that users can make detailed annotations keyed to a timeline. Or perhaps we'll incorporate tools that are developed elsewhere. This seems to be a pretty broad-based problem.
Rick P.
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