Librarian Recorded 800,000 Hours of News Footage Over 35 Years

[Askance]

Story here and all over the place - I’m surprised to find no thread on it yet.

Philadelphia librarian and social justice advocate Marion Marguerite Stokes spent 35 years of her life recording nearly every minute of every program on every local and national news network on VHS and Beta Max cassette tapes.

Now, her commitment to tracking television news may result in a searchable collection of more than 800,000 uninterrupted hours of historical news footage.

Stokes’ son, Michael Metelits says the creation of the enormous collection was a life-dominating and often arduous task for his mother, who died of lung disease in December, 2012. But despite criticism from observers, Stokes maintained that the time she spent operating as many as 8 recorders at a time, swapping out one 6-hour tape after another, would not be in vain.

…

In an effort to honor his mother’s life’s work, Metelits has teamed up with non-profit digital archive company The Internet Archive with hopes of converting Stokes’ 140,000 video cassette tape collection into a digital, searchable archive that would be made available to the public via the internet.

I think it is just brilliant that someone somewhere devoted so much effort to this. Probably not so much gets lost these days as storage is so cheap. It’s just a shame that her parents and grandparents didn’t do the same … !

[mhendo]

Wow, that’s quite a feat, and it would be amazing to have access to all that footage on the internet.

I’m rather surprised, though, that there’s not a single word in the linked article about the copyright issue. Even if one accepts that the personal recording of television programs for the purpose of time-shifting is acceptable under copyright law (the Betamax decision was narrower than many people recognize), it is quite another thing to offer thousands of hours of recorded material for public consumption.

Unless i’m missing something, there’s no way they’re going to be able to do this without permission from the copyright holders of all that news footage.

[obfusciatrist]

Considering that much of the the news content probably already exists in various archives it is the local commercials that may be of more interest to a lot of people. For example, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive goes back to 1968 for the broadcast networks, all of CNN since 1995 and Fox News since it launched. For example, from the online catalog of that archive I learn that the first commercial break for ABC Evening News on August 1, 1982, they ran commercial for Unisom Sleep Aid and the Chevrolet Citation. And after the second commercial break did stories on a coup in Kenya and the Falklands conflict. And if I wanted to see them I could request them (not quite as convenient as a YouTube channel but I’m not sure it is worth the hassle and cost this women went to).

If she was just storing her tapes in her house and storage lockers I wonder how much some of the older one have degraded (though I’d assume someone from Internet Archive did check them out). Magnetic media aren’t forever.