Marion Stokes

Marion Stokes

Marion Stokes was born Marion Butler on November 25, 1929 in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

She graduated the Philadelphia High School for Girls.

Stokes worked as a librarian for the Free Library of Philadelphia for almost 20 years.

Stokes started the taping project because she became convinced there was a lot of detail in the news at risk of disappearing forever.

Family outings with her Husband and Children were planned around the length of a VHS tape.

Every 6 hours, when the tapes ran out, Stokes and her Husband switched them out.

Later in life, when she was less agile, Stokes trained a Helper to do the task for her.

The Archives grew to about 71,000 tapes VHS and Betamax tapes (up to eight hours each) stacked in her home and apartments she rented just to store them.

She began recording the news non-stop in 1979 during the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

 Some of Stokes's tape collection consisted of 24/7 coverage of Fox, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, and other networks—recorded on up to eight separate VCRs in her house.

Stokes's final recording took place on December 14, 2012, as she was dying; it captured coverage of the Sandy Hook School Massacre.

Stokes bequeathed the entire tape collection to her son Michael Metelits, with no instructions other than to donate it to a Charity of his choice.

After considering potential Recipients, Metelits gave the collection to the Internet Archive one year after Stokes's death.

Four shipping containers were required to move the collection to Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, a move that cost her estate $16,000.

A Documentary about her life, “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” was directed by Matt Wolf  and premiered in 2019.