You HAVE TO go to this talk by Rick and Megan Prelinger, creators of
the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. Theirs is a truly inspiring and thought-provoking story of the creation of a library out of their private collections of books, ephemera, govt documents, etc.

To Build a Library: An Analog Landscape in Eight Squares

An illustrated talk by Megan Shaw and Rick Prelinger

Tuesday, September 5 at 8 p.m.

Proteus Gowanus Gallery and Reading Room
543 Union Street (near Nevins)
Brooklyn, New York

Self-description from Punk Planet, issue 75, p. 52-53. "Unofficial Histories: Zine and Ephemeral Print Archivists," interview by Anne Elizabeth Moore:

Megan, "The selections start where our feet meet the ground, in San Francisco, and end, five long rows later, in space. It's a way of organizing subjects as a 'walk' through the landscape of ideas, moving gradually from concrete to abstract, from the material to the
theoretical, and from the feet to the head...and on to the stars. Within sections, we intershelve materials across different media if they're on the same subject. For example, we have books, periodicals, government documents, and the occasional novel all together on the same shelf if they're all about the same subject, such as the rural south or the Cold War."

Rick, "The collection itself is the catalog. Walking through the aisles is like touring a garden of ideas (some identifiably good, some bad, all shelved together), thinking about how different subjects connect and interact with one another, and feeling this or that book (magazine,
map, flyer, zine) beckoning."

Jenna added some stuff 9/4/06 to James's original post.