Travor von Stein heard of the story of a woman named Marion Stokes who spent decades recording television shows, tape after tape, in her home. "I just sort of tingled," he says. "I understood this woman a little bit."

Von Stein also had somewhat a hoarding impulse, though most of what he kept was digital. And since he believed in Stokes' mission “from one kindred spirit to another," he says, "I thought we had to do it justice."

He then became a volunteer at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that plans to digitize and make public the 40,000 tapes Stokes left behind when she passed away in 2012. He's spent six weeks immersed the first of those recordings: About 60 episodes of Input, a television show that Stokes (then Marion Metelits) co-produced between 1968 and 1971 for a local CBS Network affiliate. Those episodes are now on the Internet Archive website for anyone to download.



Making Input publicly available is only a very small first step toward completing the massive task the Internet Archive took on when it accepted Stokes’s collection. To preserve the tapes, each one needs to be played back on a cassette reader, which takes time. In addition to preserving the actual footage, people have to input meta-data that can help other people explore the footage. Simply cataloging 537 VHS tapes on a spreadsheet for a sample inventory took an Internet Archive employee about 16 hours.

Many of the tapes are recorded on Betamax tapes, and the machines that can play them are almost extinct: “There are a limited set of those available in the universe,” explains Roger Macdonald, the director of the Internet Archive’s Television arm. “So we’ve started trolling eBay and the like, keeping an eye out for them, starting to purchase them and looking for people who can repair them.”

Macdonald estimates that digitizing the collection will cost more than $500,000, and most of that money still needs to be raised. The Archive is currently relying mostly on volunteers like von Stein.



[FastCo]