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| (Image credit: Josh Chiodo/Unsplash) |
Marion Stokes was a librarian from Philadelphia who started taping the TV news from 1977 to 2012. After 35 years of recording history, she accumulated almost 40,000 VHS tapes filling nine apartments, which she bought throughout her lifetime with money from Apple stock she, and other friends and family members she had convinced, had invested in earlier.
The whole process was chaotic, her son recounts. There would be several televisions running at the same time, each with their own recorder taping the news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 35 years. Stokes justified this eccentric hobby of hers by saying that she knew it would be useful to someone, someday.
And that day did come, when Roger Macdonald, a librarian himself was doing a project called the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization which aimed to build a repository of content from the past and make them available to search online.
Now, Stokes' over 40,000 tapes will be shipped to the Internet Archive where they will be digitized, one tape at a time. Her son, Michael Metelits, felt very emotional the first time he saw one of his mother's tapes in digital form.
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