Marion Stokes was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for single-handedly amassing hundreds of thousands of hours of television news footage spanning 35 years, from 1977 until her death at age 83, at which time she operated nine properties and three storage units.
Stokes' tape collection consisted of 24/7-coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC and other networks—recorded on as many as eight separate VCR machines stationed throughout her house. She had a husband and children, and family outings were planned around the length of a VHS tape. Every six hours when the tapes would be ending, Stokes and her husband would run around the house to switch them out—even cutting short meals at restaurants to make it home to switch out tapes in time. Later in life when she was not as agile, Stokes trained a helper to do the task for her. The archives ultimately grew to live on 71,716 VHS and Betamax tapes stacked in Stokes' home, as well as apartments she rented just to store them. She became convinced there was a lot of detail in the news at risk of disappearing forever, and began taping. Her son, Michael Metelits, told WNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to task ." Her collection is not the only instance of massive television footage taping, but the care in preserving the collection is very unusual. Known collections of similar scale have not been as well-maintained and lack the timely and local focus.
Other collections
In addition to collecting TV news footage, Stokes personally amassed large quantities of other items. She received half a dozen daily newspapers and 100-150 monthly periodicals, collected for half a century. Stokes had also accumulated 30,000-40,000 books. Metelits told WNYC that in the mid-1970s, they would frequent the bookstore to purchase $800 worth of new books. Stokes also held collections of toys and dollhouses.
Stokes bought many Macintosh computers since the brand's inception, along with various other Apple peripherals. At her death, 192 of the computers remained in her possession. Stokes kept the unopened items in a climate-controlled storage garage for posterity. The collection, speculated to be one of the last of its nature remaining, sold on eBay to an anonymous buyer.
Legacy
Stokes bequeathed her son Michael Metelits the entire television collection, with no instructions other than to donate it to a charity of his choice. After a stringent process of considering potential recipients, Metelits gave the collection to The Internet Archive one year after Stokes' death. Four shipping containers were required to move the collection cross-country to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move which cost her estate $16,000. It was the largest collection they had ever received. The group agreed to digitize the volumes, a process which was expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of November 2014, the project was still active. A documentary about her life, , was directed by Matt Wolf and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
