Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit Film and Digital Media Department

Title Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Porter College

Faculty Type Emeriti

Areas of Expertise Archives, Archival Practices
Digital Media
Intellectual Property
Film
American Studies
Popular Culture

Web Site

Primary Office Location Communications Building

Additional Location(s) PO Box 590622, San Francisco, CA 94118

Mail Stop Film and Digital Media

Biography, Education and Training

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting "ephemeral films" (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called "useful cinema") in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 10,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 10,000 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 37 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004, still open to the public three days a week in downtown San Francisco. He co-edited and published Footage 89: North American Film & Video Sources, the first and perhaps only comprehensive directory of moving image archives and footage sources, in 1989 with a sequel in 1991. He was Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz between 2013 and 2022.