On October 17, the Newspapers and Microfilm Center will host a screening of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project. Stokes was a Philadelphia activist, librarian, public-access television producer, and secretly, an archivist of over 30 years of TV. During the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, she started taping. She didn’t stop recording until her death in 2012 when news of the Sandy Hook massacre broke.
The archives that Marion Stokes left behind sound too big to be true: 30 years, 140,000 hours of footage, 70,000 VHS tapes.
Many assume that TV networks archived their programming. In reality, they typically considered this preservation too expensive and often reused tapes. Stokes captured the 24-hour news cycle in full, commercials and all. Skeptical of mainstream media and determined to document it, she was a guerilla archivist preserving what networks themselves did not.
Accessible archives of news media are critical to understanding the past. The Free Library’s Newspapers and Microfilm Center has more than 400 newspapers on microfilm, along with over 3,000 publications that are part of Parkway Central Library’s subject department collections. You can access these holdings whenever Parkway Central is open, and our online newspaper databases are available at all Free Library locations. You can use most of them with your library card wherever you have the internet.
Where can you watch Marion Stokes’s recordings? The Internet Archive now houses the collection and is gradually making it available. You can also watch full episodes of Input, the WCAU-TV10 roundtable discussion program she produced with her husband John S. Stokes, Jr. (it’s linked on the Free Library database page; read more about it here).
Lunise Cerin, Christina DiPasquale, and Shannon Mattern will participate in a panel discussion following the screening of Recorder, which Winter Rae Schneider of the People's Media Record will moderate. If you're unable to attend, you can watch the documentary on Kanopy or check out the DVD from the Free Library's catalog.
Registration is encouraged but not required.
Have a question for Free Library staff? Please submit it to our Ask a Librarian page and receive a response within two business days.