Marion Stokes amassed 71.716 television tapes. For 33 years, she turned her Philadelphia home into a news archive to preserve how events were reported, with eight VCRs running simultaneously.
It began on November 4, 1979, with the Iran hostage crisis. The recordings continued without interruption until December 14, 2012, the day she died.
Afterward, her son Michael donated the entire collection to Internet Archive for digitization: more than three decades of television coverage preserved on tens of thousands of tapes.
