Marion Stokes

Marion Marguerite Stokes ( Butler; November 25, 1929 – December 14, 2012) was an American access television producer, businesswoman, investor, civil rights demonstrator, activist, librarian, and archivist. She was especially known for recording and hoarding She had been operating nine properties and three storage units by the time of her death. According to the Los Angeles Review of Books review of the 2019 documentary film Recorder, Stokes's massive project of recording the 24-hour news cycle "makes a compelling case for the significance of guerrilla archiving."

Early life Marion Marguerite Butler, later named Marion Marguerite Stokes, was born on November 25, 1929, in Germantown, Philadelphia. She graduated from Girls' High. As a young woman, Stokes became politically active and was involved with a number of left-wing organizations. She was courted by the Communist Party USA, who sought to develop her as a potential leader.

In 1960, she married teacher Melvin Metelits, also a member of the Communist Party, and had a son with him.

Collections Television Stokes has been called a pioneer and visionary Some selected programs that she recorded were The Cosby Show, Divorce Court, Star Trek, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and The Today Show. The archives grew to about 71,000 tapes (originally erroneously reported as 140,000 in the media). 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. Also included are a 1984 JVC VHS deck set recording regular programs from Boston in a six-hour Extended Play format. Stokes's final recording took place on December 14, 2012, as she was dying; it captured coverage of the Sandy Hook massacre.

Macintosh computers Stokes bought many Macintosh computers. Stokes invested in Apple stock with capital from her in-laws while the company was still fledgling. Later, she encouraged her already rich in-laws to invest in Apple, advice they took and profited from. Stokes then allocated part of her profits to her recording project.

Others Stokes received half a dozen daily newspapers and 100–150 monthly periodicals,

Legacy 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, The organization agreed to digitize the volumes, a process expected to run fully on round-the-clock volunteers, costing $2 million and taking 20 digitizing machines several years to complete. As of 2022, the project is still incomplete, partially due to lack of funding. was directed by Matt Wolf and premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Festival. A book featuring imagery compiled by Wolf from more than 700 hours of Stokes's tapes, titled Input, was published in the fall of 2023.

In 2024, UK's The Duke Mitchell Film Club featured the archive for their DukeFest.