Ya think you've got a problem deciding what to keep?

Librarian Recorded 800,000 Hours of News Footage Over 35 Years

By Queen Muse
Saturday, Dec 7, 2013

Philadelphia librarian and social justice advocate Marion Marguerite Stokes spent 35 years of her life recording nearly every minute of every program on every local and national news network on VHS and Beta Max cassette tapes.

Now, her commitment to tracking television news may result in a searchable collection of more than 800,000 uninterrupted hours of historical news footage.

Stokes' son, Michael Metelits says the creation of the enormous collection was a life-dominating and often arduous task for his mother, who died of lung disease in December, 2012. But despite criticism from observers, Stokes maintained that the time she spent operating as many as 20 recorders at a time, swapping out one 6-hour tape after another, would not be in vain.

"I don't think anybody escaped helping her with this process. As you'd imagine a process like this, it just dominates family life and it just kind of structures pretty much everything else that goes on," Metelits said. "But she was really a kind of uncompromising person; she knew what she wanted and this was very important to her."

In an effort to honor his mother's life's work, Metelits has teamed up with non-profit digital archive company The Internet Archive with hopes of converting Stokes' 140,000 video cassette tape collection into a digital, searchable archive that would be made available to the public via the internet.

Director of television archive at the Internet archive Roger Macdonald said Stokes' archive could be a very useful addition to the company's ever-growing digital news collection.

"If we're able to successfully digitize this, it will open up a big window on local and national news, that's unprecedented," Macdonald said. "At the Internet Archive we're working to record and open up U.S. television news for research purposes and we've been recording since late 2000; but the addition of this collection would extend our archive back three decades."

Metelits recovered his mother's video cassette collection after she died. Shortly thereafter, he reached out to the Internet Archive and the process of preserving the tapes began.

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[See the link for the other stuff she collected ....]

John