The Perks of Volunteering for Prelinger Archives

The SAASC is excited to have guest blogger, Monica Nolan, posting this week.

The Perks of Volunteering for Prelinger Archives

As a film geek, I jumped at the chance to volunteer scanning films for the Prelinger Archives last fall. Let me try to sum up this unique treasure trove of ephemeral films in a few words: Rick Prelinger began collecting advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films as a hobby in the 1980s and eventually amassed an archive of 60,000 films that was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 (Prelinger Archives: About, n.d.). I first discovered the collection browsing the digitized versions of some of the collection, hosted on the Internet Archive website. While working as a freelance video editor, I (like many other filmmakers) regularly downloaded and used footage from these public domain films when I needed to add historical flavor to a project.

Rick has continued to add new films to the online collection, and when a friend forwarded me his call for volunteer film scanners, I replied immediately. A big perk of this volunteer gig was learning to use the lasergraphics motion picture scanner, which is capable of producing very high-resolution digital files, much better quality than I ever saw when I was working as an editor. The device is something like a projector connected to a computer controller, and I felt like I had one foot in the past world of celluloid and the other in the current digital technology, first threading the film onto the scanner, then turning to the computer to create the scan.

Film preserver Serge Bromberg once described the new capabilities of film scanning as “Photoshop, but at 24 frames a second.” (Nolan, 2015). However, although we volunteers had the ability to crop, focus and color correct the image, we were instructed to keep our adjustments to a minimum and to rely on default settings. “More product, less process,” Rick told us during the training, a phrase I would read about in detail when I took Archival Management a few months later!

The second perk of scanning these films was watching them; scanning takes place in real-time, and once I hit “run job,” there was nothing to do but watch. I saw films on Argentinean ranches, the workings of an orchestra, on etiquette, teen marriage, and how to walk safely to school. My favorite during my volunteering stint was “Healthy Teeth, Happy Smile” a dental hygiene film from 1964. Hygiene films of all kinds are quite common, but what made this one interesting to me was that it featured an integrated cast, led by an African-American protagonist. Since most educational films of the 1950s and early 60s tend to depict an almost entirely white, middle-class world, this one stood out—and the giant set of teeth the heroine scrubs with a giant toothbrush was pretty memorable too.

Nolan, M. (2015). The man in the center ring: Serge Bromberg saves cinema. San Francisco Silent Film Festival. https://silentfilm.org/the-man-in-the-center-ring-serge-bromberg-saves-cinema/ 

Prelinger Archives: About, n.d., https://archive.org/details/prelinger?tab=about accessed 10/21/20

Monica Nolan is an MLIS candidate at SJSU currently deployed as a Disaster Service Worker and eager to get back to her regular job as a page in the San Francisco Public Library.