Rick Prelinger

Rick Prelinger (born 1953, Washington, D.C.) is an archivist, associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.

Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make over 6,000 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the Voyager Company, a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen LaserDiscs and CD-ROMs with material from his archives, including Ephemeral Films, the Our Secret Century series and Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning (co-produced with architect Keller Easterling).

Life

He worked at The Comedy Channel from its startup in 1989 until it was merged into the comedy network HA!, and then worked at Home Box Office until 1995. Rick has taught in the MFA design program at New York's School of Visual Arts and lectures widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual property access. He sat (2001–2004) on the National Film Preservation Board as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, was Board President of the San Francisco Cinematheque (2002–2007), and is currently a board member of the Internet Archive. In July 2013, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

Prelinger Archives

The Prelinger Archives is a collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life and social history. It was physically located in New York City from 1982–2002 and is now in San Francisco.

The Archives were founded by Rick Prelinger in 1982 in order to preserve what he calls "ephemeral" films: films sponsored by corporations and organizations, educational films, and amateur and home movies. Typically, ephemeral films were produced to fulfill specific purposes at specific times, and many exist today only by chance or accident. About 65% of the Archive's holdings are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired, or because they were U.S. productions that were published without proper copyright notice.

The stated goal of the Prelinger Archives is to "collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere."

By 2001, it had acquired 60,000 completed films of varying lengths and over 30,000 cans of unedited film. In 2002, the Library of Congress acquired the physical films held in the Archives as of that date; the Archives made two subsequent donations to Library of Congress totalling some 65,000 cans of film, primarily industrial and educational titles. As of spring 2015, the Archives holds about 8,000 films in videotape and digital form, approximately 14,000 home movies, and 1,000 industrial and sponsored films acquired since 2002.

Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle (/ˈkeɪl/ KAYL; born October 22, 1960) is an American computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, internet activist, advocate of universal access to all knowledge, and digital librarian. He is the founder of the Internet Archive, the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union, Alexa and Thinking Machines and a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.

Biography

Kahle grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and went to Scarsdale High School. His father was a mechanical engineer. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science in computer science and engineering, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity. The emphasis of his studies was artificial intelligence; he studied under Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis.

After graduation, he joined Thinking Machines team, where he was the lead engineer on the company's main product, the Connection Machine, for six years (1983–1989). There, he and others developed the WAIS system, the Internet's first publishing and distributed search system and a precursor to the World Wide Web. In 1992, he co-founded, with Bruce Gilliat, WAIS, Inc. (sold to AOL in 1995 for $15 million), and, in 1996, Alexa Internet (sold to Amazon.com in 1999 for $250 million of stock). At the same time as he started Alexa, he founded the Internet Archive, which he continues to direct. In 2001, he implemented the Wayback Machine, which allows public access to the World Wide Web archive that the Internet Archive has been gathering since 1996. Kahle was inspired to create the Wayback Machine after visiting the offices of Alta Vista, where he was struck by the immensity of the task being undertaken and achieved: to store and index everything that was on the Web. Kahle states: "I was standing there, looking at this machine that was the size of five or six Coke machines, and there was an 'aha moment' that said, 'You can do everything.'"

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily progressive, nonprofit, independently syndicated news hour that airs on more than 1,250 radio, television, satellite and cable TV networks around the globe. The award-winning one-hour news program is hosted by investigative journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. The program is funded entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers, and foundations, and does not accept advertisers, corporate underwriting, or government funding.

Background

Democracy Now! was founded on February 19, 1996 at WBAI-FM in New York City by progressive journalists Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Larry Bensky, Salim Muwakkil, and Julie Drizin. It originally aired on five Pacifica Radio stations. Goodman is the program's principal host, with Juan Gonzalez as frequent co-host.Jeremy Scahill, an investigative reporter for The Nation, has been a frequent contributor since 1997. The program's first ten to fifteen minutes, called the "War and Peace Report", are translated daily into Spanish. The Democracy Now! website is also available in Spanish. The program focuses on issues considered underreported or ignored by mainstream news coverage. Democracy Now! began broadcasting on television every weekday shortly after September 11, 2001, and is the only public media in the U.S. that airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, radio, and the internet.

Rick

Rick is a masculine given name which may refer to:

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