DIY movement. We shared similar ideas about
collection-building, with regards to books. We both
valued book collections very highly, but valued them
as building blocks, tools, and raw materials, rather
than as static objects to be locked away.”
Soon, they — and their book collections — were
married.
When the couple’s collection, in Megan’s words,
“outstepped our immediate research needs,” they
started to think about public access. But the size
of their bounty wasn’t their main motivation for
starting the Prelinger Library. That evolved out of a
profound dissatisfaction with public and university
libraries.
Public libraries have recently been shedding
books to make room for elegant lounging spaces
and rows of computers. And with their emphasis on
query-based online cataloging, they are discouraging the sorts of serendipitous discoveries that occur
while browsing the shelves. Meanwhile, academic
libraries keep a lot of their most valuable research
materials in “closed stacks,” leaving the browser
unaware of what she is missing.
As Megan told an interviewer for In These Times,
“One of the … barriers put in place by major research
libraries is that they don’t enable ordinary people to
make use of extraordinary materials.”
By contrast, the Prelinger Library provides extraordinary materials and then encourages serendipitous
discovery. Megan has organized the flow of the
materials into a sort of narrative structure.
Like a thoughtful DJ describing a playlist, Megan
describes the interior taxonomic logic to her placement of books in an article on the library’s website:
“Row Two starts with what people do with what we
pull out of the Earth: histories of manufacturing
and industry. Mill and Factory rubs shoulders here
with Iron Age and Factory Management. The next
bank proceeds to how we move around the objects
we’ve made with what we’ve pulled out of the Earth:
histories of transportation infrastructure. Highways,
cars, railroads, airlines, and even Bus Transportation
magazine have their spaces here.”
The extraordinary is the rule here (where else will
you find the 1956–57 collection of Modern Packaging
magazine?). The Prelingers don’t believe that history
is best served by reading contemporary books by
historians, so the library is a treasure trove of original
source material. Do you want to know how the U.S.
government described aspects of its slavery policies
in sordid detail? Then why not go directly to the
source and read a government research publication
“We value book
collections very highly,
but value them as
building blocks, tools,
and raw materials,
rather than as static
objects to be locked
away.”
on slavery from the mid-19th century?
Another unique aspect of the Prelinger library is
its appropriation-friendliness. As with Rick’s earlier
film archives, the Prelingers want you to be able to
take these fragments of history and use them for
your own textual mashup — your own satire or
commentary or research project. So they’ll help
and encourage you to grab text and visuals from,
say, Factory Management magazine, Soviet Woman,
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, or the complete
125-year run of the Official Gazette of the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office, and then scan
and use them.
I point out that nobody gets in my face at my local
library when I use their copier to copy pages out
of their books. So what’s so appropriation-friendly
about the Prelingers’ place? Megan responds:
“While it may be possible to still make copies at the
public library, that doesn’t address the climate of
fear that generally governs people’s relationships
to the use of published works. People have been
conditioned by the copyright notices at Kinko’s and
other places to believe that they are not entitled
to make something out of a published work. We
encounter that with visitors who say, ‘Is it really
OK to make a scan of this? Really?’
“By offering our space as a workshop and encouraging people to photograph, copy, or scan,
we create an environment where the use made of
the materials is foregrounded in a way it isn’t at
the public library.
“Also, our library has a much greater proportion
of public-domain materials than is present in a
general reading collection in a public library. And it
has been cultivated to be image-rich, and therefore
of particular interest to artists. Combine that fact
with the presence of a flatbed scanner, and the
result is quite different than the fair-use xeroxing
Make: 55
