165 Interview with Rick Prelinger By Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera and Papagena Robbins Rick Prelinger wears many hats: he is an archivist and an activist, a writer and a filmmaker; he has preserved the eccentricities and banalities of American cultural heritage and projected them back to the world via both Open Access digital repositories and carefully curated programs of ephemeral and orphaned films. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of about 60,000 industrial, advertising, educational, and amateur films, which encourage and facilitate not only preservation, but appropriation by allowing free access, downloading and reuse of its materials. Prelinger founded the archive in 1982 in New York, and the original collection was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. As a board member of the Internet Archive, he has made over 6,000 of these films available for free online. He also co- founded an appropriation-friendly workshop, the Prelinger Library, with Megan Shaw Prelinger, in San Francisco in 2004. The library houses an unusual collection of 19 th and 20 th century American vintage ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books; and—along with the Prelinger Archives—it has become an important research and reference center for those interested in vernacular American history. His passion as a collector has led to the production of several archival compilation films, including 2004’s Panorama Ephemera and 2013’s No More Road Trips?, as well as several multi-part film programs—Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (2006-2015), Lost Landscapes of Detroit (2010-2012), Yesterday and Tomorrow in Detroit (2014 and 2015), Lost Landscapes of Oakland (2014), and the forthcoming, Lost Landscapes of Los Angeles (2015). Prelinger has been a tireless advocate of open access practices, fighting to make cultural and intellectual property universally and freely available to the public, and (with Brewster Kahle and Internet Archive) helped to organize the Open Content Alliance. For this special issue Sophie Cook, Beatriz Bartolomé Herrera, and Papagena Robbins reached Prelinger virtually to talk about his work, bridging the distance between