Internet Archive began digitizing 40,000 VHS and Betamax video tapes

Employees of the Internet Archive organization have embarked on a long and exhausting process of digitizing and publishing on the Internet the contents of 40 thousand videotapes in VHS and Betamax formats. On the tapes - recordings of television broadcasts made by Marion Stokes (Marion Stokes). She has been writing MSNBC, Fox, CNN, CNBC and CSPAN news programs for 35 years on TV. The former librarian clearly understood the importance of her work: eight video recorders were working almost 24 hours a day in her house.

Internet Archive specialists were amazed to receive unique historical material in such quantity.


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Now we have to work hard. The problem is not so much in the digitization of video, as in the painstaking work of entering the accompanying data (metadata) for the video sequence. It is necessary to indicate each person who appears in the frame, and accompany the video sequence with the decoding of conversations. For example, simply entering into the computer only the names of 537 video cassettes took about 16 hours from an employee of the Internet Archive.

Six weeks were spent on digitizing the first part of the Marion Stokes collection, which recorded about 60 issues of the Input program, a journalistic program that went on Sunday morning on the regional TV channel WCAU-TV10 in Philadelphia from 1968 to 1971. Guests invited to the studio discussed genetic engineering, Eastern religions, the war of the sexes, the payment of compensation for slavery, the gap between generations, educational reform, etc. For many participants of the 45-year-old broadcasts, this is the only remaining visual material, although there are many historically significant people among them. Now the collection is available for free .


One of the boxes with Marion cassettes.

In the 1960s and 1970s, television had nothing to do with the high-rhythm TV shows of modern times. Then the invited experts sat down in a semicircle in front of the camera and each one slowly, slowly, expressed his opinion. At the beginning of the Input program there is no entry, it just turns on the air from the middle of the conversation.


A significant part of the Marion collection is recorded on Betamax tapes: the equipment had to be searched for on eBay, and it was also necessary to look for engineers who could fix it.

According to the Internet Archive, digitization of the collection will cost about $ 500 thousand. A significant part of this amount has yet to be collected in the form of charitable contributions. Need and help volunteers.