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Prelinger Archives

Dataset Prelinger Archives
Licence ODC Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Published 7th March 2011
Updated 2nd March 2012
Resources 61269

Prelinger Archives

ODC Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)

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 was 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.

This dataset consists of metadata about more than 2,000 public domain films that the Prelinger Archives have made available for unrestricted use via the Internet Archive.

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Default APIs

SPARQL Endpoint

Use the SPARQL 1.1 query language to perform structured queries against a dataset. Useful for performing precise queries against a dataset whose structure you understand.

Sample queries

List titles, makers and sponsors
Leigh Dodds
11th Aug 2011

List the titles of films along with the name of the film maker and sponsor, where available. Also returns the identifier for the film, the film maker and sponsor.

Query: 
PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> PREFIX dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> PREFIX p: <http://data.kasabi.com/dataset/prelinger-archives/schema/> SELECT ?s ?title ?maker ?makerName ?sponsor ?sponsorName WHERE { ?s a p:MovingImage; dcterms:title ?title. OPTIONAL { ?s foaf:maker ?maker. ?maker foaf:name ?makerName. } OPTIONAL { ?s p:sponsor ?sponsor. ?sponsor foaf:name ?sponsorName } }
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Search API

Perform a free-text search against the text fields indexed in a dataset. Useful when you want to quickly query a dataset but don't know, or need to know its structure. There is also a solr search endpoint allowing more complex queries.

Lookup API

Retrieve a description of a single resource. Useful for fetching the key properties and relationships of a single entity.

Reconciliation API

Useful for resolving names, labels or codes against a dataset in Kasabi to find links to more data. This API is compatible with the Google Refine tool.

How to Attribute This Dataset

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To directly embed an attribution message in a webpage, add a script tag that invokes our Attribution API as follows

<script
     type="text/javascript"
     src="http://api.kasabi.com/dataset/prelinger-archives/attribution">
</script>

If you need more flexible options, then read the Attribution API documentation

Contributed APIs
Prelinger Archives movies by year SPARQL Stored Procedure
Fadi Maali
10th Aug 2011

get all movies published in a specific year. Movie details returned are title, subject(s), sound and colour

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Media