Prelinger Library Blog

Our Maker Faire Experience

2009-06-01T17:17:00.000-07:00

Wow, Maker Faire was incredible! The how-to library and reading room that we installed was fairly mobbed with visitors. Without the support of Freya Channing and Dawn Wilson our booth at the Faire would have been an overwhelming, even impossible job. On the first day, Saturday, we had as many visitors to our booth as we had had the previous year over the entire weekend. We estimate that around 2,000 people stopped by the booth. At least 1,000 browsed for a few minutes, and over 800 flyers were taken. Within those numbers, dozens and dozens of visitors settled into the reading room for a while and really dug in to the material. It was extremely gratifying and exciting to facilitate all these visits. We couldn't help but notice that more people visited the library at Maker Faire in one weekend than typically visit us in our home location over the course of a year. Dawn is above; Freya is also above, talking with the editors of Bay Nature magazine. More pictures are on the library's Facebook page.

Interview with Michael Krasny on KQED's Forum

2009-05-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

Our thanks to interviewer Michael Krasny for hosting our one-hour on-air presence at KQED this morning. The Forum program that features the two of us can be heard at www.kqed.org/forum. It's predominantly a discussion about the film archive with Rick, but secondarily about the Library with both of us. -- M&R

Volunteer appreciation

2009-04-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

The library has never been in better shape. And it's only because of a dedicated core group of volunteers. In mid-April Freya Channing celebrated her first full year of working with us. Amazing! She has nearly singlehandedly spearheaded the processing of our ephemera collection. Without her full year of work on the project, the ephemera shelves would not be a well-ordered assembly of organized archival boxes.

Pamela Jackson was our right-hand assistant in the summer of 2006: Without her help we would not have been able to effectively process the collections that were transferred to and from the Internet Archive for digitization that year. She returned to working with us this spring, and is currently helping with the critical project of clarifying the internal structure of the rough-processed ephemera collection. Being a degreed librarian, she brings a sensibility for organization and paper handling to the operation that is beneficial to everyone. She taught us how to apply mylar jacket protectors to dust jackets.

Dawn Wilson is volunteering with us for six months while she and her spouse are living in San Francisco temporarily. Also a degreed librarian, Dawn is helping us refine access to our digital books collection. Her project is the construction of a series of browsable static index pages that will display links to our digital books in an organized manner. We expect her project to become public in June.

Christopher Carley, the writer and film editor, is currently volunteering to help us sort the film-related ephemera, and is also a part-time scholar in residence pursuing his own research on an ongoing basis.

We thank each of them wholeheartedly!

--Megan&Rick

New Material from Kayo Books

2009-04-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

We picked up a few jewels for the science fiction collection at Kayo Books recently. Anyone able to drop in to their store in San Francisco should make the trip. Their collection of sci-fi, mystery, and trash pulps and magazines is incomparable.

Pop-Up Magazine Review

2009-04-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Mission Mission blog for such nice words about our presentation at Pop-Up Magazine on Wednesday night! How sweet!

Visitors referred here by that blog post please go on ahead to our library main page at www.prelingerlibrary.org.

--Megan

Welcoming Thanksgiving holiday visitors to SF

2008-11-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

As in past years, we welcome visitors to San Francisco for the Thanksgiving holiday. The library will be open on Wednesday, November 26 from 1 pm to 8 pm and on Saturday, November 29 from 3 pm to 6 pm. No appointment's necessary during these hours — just drop by!

Come and get some books! (Wed., 9/24, 4:00 - 8:00 pm)

2008-09-22T11:48:00.000-07:00

We've been spending a lot of time de-duplicating and honing the collection, in line with our "spaghetti-sauce theory of collection development," which holds that continual reduction makes the mix richer and tastier. So we've now got carts and boxes with maybe 600-700 duplicates and extra materials we can't keep.

Most of these are older books, and most of these you won't see elsewhere. Just a few of the many topics include: birds, old travel guides 1930s-1970s, sociology, geography, European history, etc. Some bound periodicals will also be available, as well as a bunch of Law and Order magazines and a multivolume "Index to Little Magazines."

Come to the library at 301 8th St (corner of Folsom), in downtown San Francisco, between 4 pm and 8 pm on Wednesday, 9/24.

Theoretical Book Club visit

2008-08-03T17:03:00.001-07:00

It's been a hummingly busy summer in the library; a summary of summer notables will have to keep for the moment. Today's notable was the visit from eight members of San Francisco's Theoretical Book Club. It was great to meet everyone in the club. Special thanks to visit organizer Laurel Connell, and to club member Ann Marie Matheus, who made an exciting donation.

In the 1960s, Danish be-bop jazz aficionado Jorgen Grunnet Jepsen published a jazz discography covering 1942 to 1962, listing all albums, their tracks, and all of their contributing artists. I'd heard of this discography, being a be-bop listener, but hadn't seen it before. We really appreciate this nifty donation. Thank you, Ann Marie. And thanks to the shelf organization work done earlier in the summer by intern Freya Channing, there was room for it right on the jazz shelf.

Today's visit was memorable to an audiophile like me beyond the donation of the Jepsen books. With the Theoretical Book Club, at least as many conversations today were about music as were about books. Delightful. Particular thanks too to Isabella Battig who even gave me a CD to listen to. -- MSP

New shelves installed!

2008-05-29T22:59:00.001-07:00

First and foremost we owe profuse thanks to our wonderful intern Freya Channing. Without Freya's energy, we would have taken much longer to get off our duffs and finish shelving everything that was waiting to be shelved, as of April. That's done. Then last week, the new shelves were installed! Check them out. Again with Freya's help, we shelved all of the ephemera boxes that were destined for new homes on the shelves. In one fell swoop, the ephemera collection has been made tremendously more orderly, sensible, and accessible. We invite everyone who has ever taken a cursory glance through a gray box to return and dive in: Maps, pamphlets, blueprints, photos, screeds, rare gov docs, unpublished papers, drive-in menus, and much more, await those who push beyond the covers, beyond the book. Deep into the library. —MSP

Ready for new shelves!

2008-05-20T15:38:00.001-07:00

Ever seen the back of the room empty before?

Five more years! New shelves!

2008-05-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

The past couple of weeks have seen great changes set in motion around the library. First, we obtained a lease renewal that will keep us in our digs at 8th and Folsom through the autumn of 2013! Five more years! We are thrilled with this news.

The lease renewal means that we are going to proceed with a modest expansion of our shelf space and a moderate rearrangement of our holdings. On Tuesday, May 20, new shelves will be built in the back portion of the room against both the left and right walls. Only the back wall with the windows will remain shelfless. We will then, starting on Wednesday, begin relocating all of the "gray boxes" (the ephemera boxes) onto the new shelves. This represents something of a departure from our original intention to keep all print media types co-housed by subject. However our ephemera collection has grown to over 500 boxes in the four years since we opened. At this scale, it became progressively impractical to co-house them with the books, maps, and periodicals on the shelves. As regular visitors well know, the gray boxes currently mostly sit on the floor in Row One, absent of any organizing principle whatsoever. Now they will be alphabetized and easily retrievable. Wednesday visitors will see the project in motion. -- MSP

Murder Can Be Fun library blog

2008-05-06T10:21:00.000-07:00

Murder Can Be Fun now has a blog. The genre-bending, page-turning zine of evil fun has been written and published for two decades by our associate John Marr. Mr. Marr's library of true crime and mystery is a marvel of independent librarianship, and now the library is developing a public face in the form of this blog. Fantastic. -- MSP

Maker Faire report

2008-05-06T10:11:00.001-07:00

We had a terrific time at the Maker Faire this weekend. It was an eye-popping blitz of robots, crafts, kinetic sculpture, re-engineering events, open-source workshops and tesla coil sparks. And much more. Too much to describe. Especially since we spent most of our time at our own booth. We were graced by the organizers with three couches to furnish our reading room, making ours the softest and most comfortable exhibit in the faire. People liked the books, too. The colorful covers of old issues of Popular Mechanix and Craftwork and Science and Mechanics drew people right over, and then they picked up volumes to read and settled in to the couches. We also exhibited the digitized flip-book of Amateur Work from 1902 and 1903. A couple of people read Repair Men May Gyp You all the way through. Hundreds of people dropped by our table over the weekend, and over a hundred settled in to read and signed the guest book. We posted photo sets of our faire experience on flickr at both http://www.flickr.com/photos/footage and http://www.flickr.com/photos/alcids. -- MSP

Come see us at Maker Faire

2008-04-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

We're going to bring a miniature library to Maker Faire on Saturday and Sunday, May 3 and 4, at the San Mateo County Event Center and Fairgrounds in San Mateo, California. If you're planning to attend, please come, sit down, relax and read a selection of old and new how-to and DIY books and magazines.

The Radio Ephemera Challenge

2008-04-28T13:10:00.001-07:00

We are delighted to announce our first, and hopefully not last, collaboration with the Third Coast International Audio Festival — Radio Ephemera!

Radio Ephemera, which is Third Coast Festival's 2008 audio challenge, invites producers, artists, writers and radio fans of all stripes (newbies to veterans) to submit finished audio works (aka Radio Ephemera) inspired by two books from the library, including the voice of a stranger, and lasting two and one-half to three minutes.

Working with the Festival's Julie Shapiro, we chose five books. Your challenge: to craft a story connecting any two of them, using the voice of a stranger. The books, which include some of our favorites, such as Trees as Good Citizens and The Big Strike, may all be reached, browsed, downloaded and excerpted from here. This is a wonderful chance to bridge text and performance, libraries and radio, past and present.

The deadline is midnight on August 3rd. We can't wait to see what you will make.

Intern achievement rankings results

2008-03-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

For June 2006 – January 2008, the percentage of Library interns admitted to Ph.D. programs at Harvard before age 23 = 100%!

Congratulations to Jeremy Blatter, our one and only intern (so far), whose remarkable academic achievement makes our intern program look really, really good! [heh heh]. Thank you, Jeremy.

Technology in Wartime conference remarks

2008-01-26T14:50:00.000-08:00

Writing today from the CPSR conference on technology in wartime. The conference speakers all make interesting points that with increasing technological change, the boundary between peacetime and wartime becomes more and more blurred. Cindy Cohn from the EFF presented about the EFF's case against AT&T with regards to AT&T's compliance with warrantless wiretapping. She made the key point that even if the NSA/AT&T plan program for warrantless wiretapping happened to be right and legal during wartime (a consideration just for the sake of argument), that nevertheless the way in which the system is being built is permanent. Therefore there's no way the NSA/AT&T plan can make a claim for legitimacy based on wartime-only use. And the new infrastructure makes sure that non-wartime can never return.

Another thread of the day has been the question of whether the north American public is too un-concerned with the prospects of cyber warfare. Some speakers feel that the public will need a cyber-equivalent to Pearl Harbor in order to develop an ingrained sense of vulnerability. Other speakers, notably Herb Lin from the National Academy of Science, say that another way to look at it is to see that the cyber-Pearl Harbor is already happening, it's just happening too slowly for most people to notice. Keynote speaker Bruce Schneier expressed the opinion that a computer crash, or hack, may have started the snowball that led to the August '04 blackout that hit the whole Northeast U.S.

Throughout the day's talks, "wartime" is consistently presented and conceived as state-based conflict, and the several speakers with ties to U.S. government have naturally presented the ethical and strategic problems facing fighters of cyber-war in very national/istic terms. Quite understandable, of course. But it nevertheless feels a little odd to me in the context of the history of broadly-conceived civil liberties and populist movements (both domestic and international) from which the discourse of social responsibility emerges. Luckily CPSR founder Terry Winograd wound up the day, and had the presence of mind to speak for many about the alternate view. Whereas many speakers of the day took war for granted, Winograd was the only one to explicitly state that we should always question the wars themselves, not just how computer professionals can make war "better."

Leading to that remark, the most unsettling panel today was the morning session on the possibility of programming ethics into robots in battlefields and robot soldiers. All three panelists, one right after the other, expressed no contrary opinions, instead merely varying degrees of optimism about the hope that robots can ultimately be more ethical soldiers than human beings (!!!!).

On an up note, everyone should go to stopthespying.org and submit their picture to be counted in the battle against NSA spying. As Cindy Cohn pointed out: the U.S. government behaves as if a public consensus in favor of government spying exists, when in fact it does not! And the EFF's remedy is to create a literal picture of the constituency against spying. --MSP

And now for something completely different…

2008-01-17T12:13:00.001-08:00

The library now has a MySpace page! Meet up with us in cyberspace and make the library your "friend." --MSP

Supreme Court denies certiorari in our copyright case

2008-01-07T09:17:00.000-08:00

This morning the Supreme Court denied cert in our case. Lessig explains on his blog.

Library Reacts to Geology

2007-11-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

What fell off the shelf in the October 30 temblor? Geologic forces reached up and pulled... Great Science Fiction by Scientists (ed. Conklin); Alternating Currents (ed. Pohl); J. G. Ballard's Kingdom Come; Philip K. Dick's The Golden Man; Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter; Bored of the Rings by the Harvard Lampoon; and J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the 1970 boxed set from my childhood with triptych cover artwork by B. Reul (?). The boxed set stayed intact when it fell, so none of the volumes was injured. -- MSP

Prelinger Library inside out

2007-09-05T17:43:00.000-07:00

That's what's going to happen on Wednesday, October 3, at 7:16 pm (the moment of civil twilight).

Illuminated Corridor is putting on a giant event in the street and parking lot outside the Library.

Come for a collision of public art, live music and film inspired by the Library and Archives' collections, featuring many performative projectionists and musicians, including (but not limited to) Craig Baldwin, Cinepimps (Alfonso Alvarez and Keith Arnold), Steve Dye, António Jorge Gonçalves, Killer Banshee, Charles Kremenak, and Gino Robair, who'll conduct his new score to RP's movie Panorama Ephemera. Neighborhood Public Radio will also be on scene, so bring those FM radios!

The Corridor will follow (and slightly overlap) with the Library's traditional Wednesday Open House evening hours, where you are invited to lose yourself in the stacks of an extraordinary library turned inside out for an evening.

Good news for the public domain?

2007-09-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

The 10th Circuit handed down its opinion (PDF here) in the case of Golan et al. v. Gonzales yesterday. Golan challenged the constitutionality of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), which restored copyrights to many thousands of non-US creative works. As was argued in our own case, Kahle et al. v. Gonzales, Golan asserted that Congress departed from the "traditional contours of copyright protection" and limited free speech so as to violate the First Amendment, in this case by pulling works out of the public domain.

We argued in the 9th Circuit that the removal of renewal formalities constituted a departure from copyright's traditional contours, and lost. But Golan's First Amendment assertion convinced the 10th, who remanded the case back to the District Court for a rehearing.

So how is this good news? There's now a split between the 9th and 10th Circuits on the issue of copyright and First Amendment rights, and this split makes it much more likely that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari (i.e., accept our petition) and potentially reverse the 9th Circuit decision.

William Patry presents a contrary perspective here.

There are lots of people to thank for this. Larry Lessig and Chris Sprigman explain the issues much better than we can, and give credit where it's due. -- RP

Visit to the Warburg Institute Library

2007-07-20T04:59:00.000-07:00

London's Warburg Institute has often been called the inspiration for our own classification and arrangement system, but we're actually unwitting followers in their path. Here are a few photos from our recent visit (hard to catch the essence of a library through photography!).

Poor Melvil Dewey

2007-07-20T02:19:00.000-07:00

The coverage of Maricopa County's departure from Dewey continues. This morning it's in the Wall Street Journal.

Scanning update

2007-07-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

We continue to send books and periodicals to the Internet Archive scanning center. Some recent periodical titles that have been digitized:

American City (we have just commenced a long run)
Kansas Historical Quarterly
New Mexico Historical Review
Radio Broadcast
Social Hygiene (later Journal of Social Hygiene) (complete)
Wisconsin Archeologist

We are also finishing Educational Screen (1922-63), beginning the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (1930-63), and National Municipal Review.

A considerable number of interesting books are now up as well. Just a few:

The report and testimony before the Commission of Industrial Relations, 1912-16, including testimony by Mother Jones, Bill Haywood and many others.

War Gases: Their Identification and Decontamination (courtesy of Rosemarie Prelinger)

Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children (courtesy of Ken Swezey and Laura Lindgren)

The Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States (1910-13), in 19 volumes

Why Women Cry: or, Wenches with Wrenches, by Elizabeth Hawes (1943)

More soon!