New Criticals

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, 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.

Here are Rick's first five...

"Self-serving, but I like to wake up to see what's newly been digitized by friend and contractor Skip Elsheimer, and look for new annotations and reviews. Fascinated to observe the accretion of new metadata around online resources and the growing stability of online moving images."

"Banal, but it's a humming party line (in the sense of oldskool shared telephone lines) for people interested in recordkeeping, archives, and memory. In my field, tweets broach ideas that range on a continuum from provisional to polished, and a busy tweetstream is better than a year of crowded conferences."

"Simply because I'm curious to see what jumps the threshold from parochial to bigtime. This isn't to say I recognize their authority, but I like to watch it being articulated."

"Kate Theimer's blog pulls together a broad spectrum of emerging thought on archives, and continues to convince me that the archive lives conceptually at the center of contemporary discourse, even if archivists don't yet realize it themselves."

"Unavoidable."

Thumbnail image of Rick was provided by him.