But I'll go even further, and say that information needs loving care from people to whom its survival and integrity deeply matter. People like Rick Prelinger, the archivist behind "Our Secret Century" -- a massive project on 12 CD-ROMs that assembles a fascinating saga of social history from American industrial and educational films of the '30s, '40s and '50s.

On the face of it, this is not promising stuff: these "ephemeral films" -- about this year's models from General Motors, or safety at railroad crossings -- were usually made with some pressing corporate agenda in mind, and not meant for the ages. Acting and direction tend to be laughable, and production values are all over the map. With its ballroom dancers caressing sleek Frigidaires and its paeans to paternalistic codes of behavior, "Our Secret Century" provides endless opportunities for campy derision of the way our ancestors were, wanted to be, or were supposed to be.

In the informational morass of cable TV, that's all these films would amount to -- fodder for "Mystery Science Theatre 3000." Prelinger's accomplishment is to build them into something more informative and valuable, and also, ultimately, more mysterious and funny. A film collector and "media archaeologist," he insists on treating these movies not simply as media detritus to be mocked -- though that may be what first catches our eyes -- but as historical documents to be explored. Then, with a skeptical yet engaging voice, he transforms them into a gallery of the dreams and nightmares of American people and institutions.

The first volume, "The Rainbow Is Yours," collects visions of '50s design that beckoned viewers toward a consumer paradise in which each year brought whiter refrigerators and bigger tailfins. "Capitalist Realism," the second, presents three '30s industrial films that show different faces of Depression labor. Volume three, "The Behavior Offensive," collects examples of post-war educational films that preached togetherness -- and submissiveness. And in volume four, "Menace and Jeopardy," 1950s-style safety films offer viewers unintended thrills via the spectacle of catastrophes to avoid. (Voyager, "Our Secret Century's" publisher, has eight more volumes on the way.)

Prelinger introduces each volume with talking-head commentary, but it's his written notes that really shape the experience of watching each film. It's here that he can explain, for instance, the huge difference in perspective between Chevrolet's 1936 "Master Hands," which celebrates the skills of the company's work force, and the 1937 "From Dawn to Sunset," which lavishes far more attention on the distribution of paychecks than on the assembly of cars, portraying the employees as eager consumers rather than skilled laborers. (The crucial difference: between the two films, a sit-down strike at Chevrolet's Flint plant had galvanized labor organizing in the auto industry.) Similarly, Prelinger expounds the subtle evolution in attitude between the optimism of GM's 1956"Design For Dreaming," which portrayed thrilled couples cruising down the "Electronic Highway of Tomorrow," and the toned-down domestic sensibility of 1961's "A Touch of Magic," in which the futuristic has become everyday.

Throughout the series Prelinger takes pains to remind us that these films are not documentaries -- that they more often present fantasies of how their makers or sponsors wanted the world to be than records of how it actually was. It's in the behavioral films that the disparity is most obvious and revelatory: in the nightmarish 1950 "A Date With Your Family," which counsels a kind of authoritarian repression that makes "Leave it to Beaver" look positively permissive, or the 1947 "Are You Popular?," which offers a straight-faced handbook of conformity in the guise of a guide to dating etiquette. ("He is proud to be with Caroline because she looks well, is friendly with everyone, and is considerate of their feelings. She likes him for these same reasons.")

It is a wonderful irony that these informational scraps have found a home in the over-hyped and now much-maligned CD-ROM medium. In many ways it's a perfect match: it's pointless to "repurpose" otherwise available material to CD-ROM -- but it makes sense to use the format as a cheap way to distribute stuff that's obscure or out-of-print. And these aren't films that suffer much from the inevitable compromises of picture quality that the CD-ROM medium involves.