Ephemera

What it does

A catalog of the Prelinger Archives: 8,038 industrial, educational and advertising films, the kind once shown in classrooms, factories and sales meetings, now held by the Internet Archive. Search it, narrow it down, open a film, and watch it without leaving the page.

• Search matches titles, descriptions and tags as you type, with a running count of what’s left.
• Filters: 41 subject chips (Cold War, Social guidance, Health and hygiene…), a decade, and a length slider drawn over a histogram of how long the films run.
• Sort by most viewed, newest, oldest or title, as a grid of posters or a compact list.
• Each film opens in a panel with its year, views, description and tags. The Watch here button plays it in the Internet Archive’s own player; there are links to its page there and to download it.
• Star films into My List, and copy a link to any one of them that shows its title and poster when you paste it.
• An About page that’s honest about the records: how many films have a description, a year, a tag or a length.