I've been a moving image archivist since 1983, specializing in ephemeral films (advertising, educational, industrial and sponsored films) which many scholars now call "useful cinema." Useful cinema is an umbrella term for films that were produced to do a job: to train, educate, sell, promote, convince or persuade. In 2002 my archives of 60,000 useful films was acquired by Library of Congress. Since then (in collaboration with Megan Prelinger) the archives has focused on collecting home movies. We presently hold over 30,000 home movies. Over 8,600 items from our collection are available online at Internet Archive. Under a generous grant from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, we are scanning film at a fast pace and adding the digital files to our online collection. I've written about industrial and sponsored films and edited The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006). I do a lot of writing and public speaking on issues facing archives in the 21st century; many of my talks are here.

I've made 30 films, including Panorama Ephemera (2004), No More Road Trips? (2013), and 25 live urban history film events. Most are available for free viewing and download at my website.

Megan Prelinger and I founded Prelinger Library in 2004, an experimental research library open to the public in San Francisco. The library has hosted two Wikipedia editathons in 2019, and we look forward to more.

I'm also a board member of Internet Archive and Emerit Professor (2013-2022) of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.

In the long run I hope to improve the quality and verifiability of entries relating to useful cinema, educational film, sponsored film, producers and filmmakers.