During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

November 7 , 2006

The Prelinger Archives
Preserving ephemeral treasures into the developing digital age

A frame from a Prelinger video

If you are old enough to recall the mid-twentieth century, you remember safety films shown in school, training films by corporations and the unforgettable civil defense films with information about how much destruction to expect if an atom-bomb landed in a city. The picture on this page is a frame from a telephone company film describing how long distance telephone calls were completed by operators.

Rick Prelinger calls films like these and printed materials of the same sort “ephemerals.” As the definition from the Webster's International dictionary implies, one would guess that such materials from early 20th century decades would by now be gone:

Ephemeral . . .
Etymology: Greek ephemacronmeros, literally, lasting a day, daily (from epi- + hemacronmera day) . . .
: devoted to what is of temporary interest <a medium so ephemeral as radio> <prose drama is the most ephemeral of the arts ... practically all plays find their resting places on the library shelves after their brief day or few decades in the theater -- R.A.Cordell>

Due to the work of Rick Prelinger, over 48,000 advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films are now part of the Library of Congress. In 1983 he founded the Prelinger Archives and over the next twenty years he collected the materials, which he then transferred to the Library.

In 2002, Lisa Rein (“CC” below) interviewed Prelinger ("RP") about his project. The full interview is online at CreativeCommons. Prelinger described his collection in this interview excerpt:

CC: Rick, what exactly is the Prelinger Archives?

RP: The Prelinger Archives is a large collection of what I call "ephemeral films." These are industrial, advertising, educational, amateur and government films — films that were generally made not to show in movie theatres or on TV, but films that were made to teach, to educate, sometimes to miseducate, to train, to sell, pitch a product, or promote an idea. Films that embody the persuasions of the past. In addition to showing us the way things were, they also show how things were supposed to be. They are a wonderful set of visions of the way we were supposed to think, what we were supposed to buy. A vision of the sort of people we were supposed to become, and as such they record aspects of our history that are suppressed. They are not necessarily public aspects of our history.

CC: What do you mean "not necessarily public aspects of our history"?

RP: I'll give you an example. If we want to have a sense of what it was like to be a member of a family, a nuclear family in the American 50's or 60's, you really can't get that authentically from a TV sit com, or from a Hollywood movie, or from a news reel. But when you see these films, they are filled with footage of idealized families in action. We get a sense of how the family actually looked and behaved, what was the body language, what were the gender roles, how kids were supposed to behave differently than adults, and you also get a sense of that sort of all-encompassing ideology. So you could argue that all of these films, in a way, are sort of an ethnographic vision of a lost America.

Putting the collection safely away

In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, where it will be safe over time. For a period of 12 years after this acquisition, permission from the Prelinger Archives must be obtained before materials from the Library of Congress can be duplicated. This arrangement provides compensation to Prelinger for the acquisition.

The Prelinger Archives has acquired additional materials after the Library of Congress arrangement was concluded. As Internet Archive explains, “[The Prelinger Archives] 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."

Prelinger owns a small stock footage company that grosses in six figures. He has an exclusive arrangement with Archive Films by Getty Images for supplying higher-quality footage for productions use. Those obtaining copies of films through the Getty arrangement pay for the service and receive an agreement with the purchaser’s name at the top as the industry requires for insurance. The customer gets a research service from these arrangements as well.

Prelinger also gives away millions of downloads of his films. As this discussion details below, the opening of the content of the collection for free distribution has been a pioneering model for the digital age.

Giving the collection away for free

In 1999, Rick Prelinger was looking for a way to get the material he collected out into the world. He realized the importance of the fact that the material would not be exhausted by being used. Prelinger talked about the challenge with Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive (Archive.org) and from their discussion the decision was made to put the films online for free. Prelinger describes it as “a leap of faith.”

In 1999 it was necessary to figure out how to digitize the video. Doing so was an expensive process but Prelinger and Kahle moved ahead and began putting digital versions of films from the collection into the Internet Archive. The first films were online for free downloading very early in 2001. So much traffic resulted that the Archive.org site broke and had to be brought back online. Within a year there had been over a million downloads. Since that time, the download traffic has been strong and steady year after year. In the fall of 2006, there are close to 2,000 films downloadable for free from the Internet Archive.

As the Internet Archive 2006 introduction to the project explains, about 2,000 key titles are available at Archive.org: “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.”

The profit in giving things away

The Prelinger Archives, through downloads from Internet Archive, is giving away for free thousands of films downloaded thousands of times. In doing so materials that were once ephemeral have gotten out into the world again. Bygone times and ways of doing and thinking are recaptured and rebroadcast. Grandchildren who sport cool mobile phones can watch the telephone company explain how operators connected long distance, something very impressive to their grandparents when they were kids.

There is profit to the culture in recapturing ephemeral materials. But in the free distribution of the materials, there has been plenty of profit too for Prelinger. The year after the films began to be available for free, sales of the footage almost doubled. In an interview with online magazine Stay Free!, Rick Prelinger explained:

Content owners could benefit dramatically from giving things away. Take my archives as an example. My movies have always had a certain cult following but I could have never predicted w’d get over a million films downloaded in a little over a year. I gross in the low six-figures annually by selling stock footage to television producers and ad agencies. But I also put 1,100 films on the web for free. These films promote what we have in the archives and the images make their way back into the culture. The increased circulation of the images ups their value.

On November 7, 2006, Prelinger explained in an interview with the author of this article (Judy Breck) that “ubiquitous equals value.” He said that films and images are not “exhausted by being used; ubiquity is very important.” He explained that by getting the materials in the Prelinger Archives “out into the world” and used many times—with now over seven million downloads—they become ubiquitous. The result, he said is that “sales are heavily influenced by putting them up for free.”

Creative Commons early adopter

Rounding out its role model stature for open online content, the Prelinger Archives is among the first Creative Commons licensees of consequence. The Creative Commons was found in 2001 as the first Prelinger films were offered through the Internet Archive. Since that time, all Prelinger downloads carry a CC license.

The New York Times
April 12, 2004

To the Editor:

While the Recording Industry Association of America pursues its heavy-handed offensive against music downloading and file sharing (Business Day, April 5), other owners of cultural content have found ways to live (and flourish) with emerging technologies.

I have operated a small family-owned historical film archives for 20 years. Several years ago, we digitized the most sought-after images in our collection and placed them online for free downloading and nearly unrestricted reuse.

Our experience may seem counterintuitive, but it has been overwhelmingly positive: the more we give away, the more we actually sell.

File sharing and free downloading have increased the ubiquity and prominence of our collection and have given it ample publicity at very little cost, resulting in increased income.

Might there be a lesson here for the music industry?

RICK PRELINGER