One night in a small apartment in Philadelphia, there were 12 VCRs recording, all on the same set of flickering channels. It's what the librarian Marion Stokes’ life looked like; she started taping American television in November of 1979 and continued until her death in December of 2012. By the end, she had more than 70,000 tapes. The collection was hers and her family's alone for decades; only after her death did her son donate it to the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library, which has since taken ownership of the tapes and is working, tape by tape, to digitize them for free public access, a process still years from complete. Her story is a useful check on the assumption that whatever happens online, or on air, is automatically preserved.
The woman who didn't believe in the off switch
