Marion Stokes
Marion Marguerite Stokes (née Butler; November 25, 1929December 14, 2012) was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, access television producer, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and prolific archivist, especially known for 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. Collections. Television news. The tape collection consisted of 24/7-coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separate VCRs 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 about 71,000 (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media) VHS and Betamax tapes (many up to 8 hours each) stacked in her home and apartments she  rented just to store them. She became convinced there was a lot of detail in the news at risk of disappearing forever, so she began taping. Her son, Michael Metelits, told WNYC that Stokes "channeled her natural hoarding tendencies to [the] task [of creating an archive]". 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. Macintosh computers. 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. Sensing the immense potential of the Apple brand during its infancy, Stokes had the foresight to invest in Apple stock while the company was still fledgling by using capital from her in-laws. Later on, she would encourage her already-rich in-laws to also invest in Apple, advice which they followed  and profited greatly from, increasing their already impressive wealth even further. Stokes would then allocate a portion of her profits into her around-the-clock recording project. Others. She received half a dozen daily newspapers and 100–150 monthly periodicals, collected for half a century. She accumulated 30,000–40,000 books. Metelits told WNYC in the mid-1970s that the family would frequent the bookstore to purchase $800 worth of new books. She collected toys and dollhouses. Television producer. From 1967 to 1969, Stokes co-produced a Sunday morning television show in Philadelphia, called "Input," with her husband John. Its focus was on  social justice topics. 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. Stokes has been described as a pioneer and a visionary who committed much of her life to preserving televisual history. Her primary objective was to "protect the truth" from fake news and to let people assess the archived material objectively. Stokes' final recording took place as she was dying; it captured the Sandy Hook massacre