( CNN ) -- Marion Stokes , a child of the Great Depression , spent her life saving everything -- literally . The Philadelphia resident kept everything from newspapers and electronics to empty cigarette packets and sticky-notes . Among the cardboard boxes and magazine stacks in her home were 140,000 cassette tapes containing recordings of all local and national TV news programs from every channel . Stokes spent 35 years recording the news 24 hours a day , 7 days a week . That amounts to 840,000 hours of videotaped news . With help from her family and a personal assistant , Stokes systematically recorded the news at her home until her death at age 83 in December 2012 . She left her collection of tapes— her `` life 's work '' — to her only son , Michael Metelits . She gave him no specific instruction but told him that he could donate them to a charity of his choice . On Tuesday , Stokes ' cassette tapes will arrive at the Internet Archive , a nonprofit organization in California , after a cross-country journey in four large shipping containers . The organization will digitize all 140,000 tapes into a public , searchable online archive . The $ 2 million project will take about 20 digitizing machines , volunteers working around the clock , funding and several years to complete , Metelits said . Metelits said he always knew what his mother wanted to do with the tapes . He called his mother a private yet persistent woman who believed that if the public had access to good information , they would make good decisions . Stokes , a TV producer , librarian and political activist , took it upon herself to preserve hundreds of thousands of hours of televised news in hopes of one day making these tapes a repository of knowledge available to the public . Now , nearly one year after her death , Metelits is finishing what his mother started in 1977 when she bought her first videotape recorder . `` I feel confident that maintaining a family connection and supporting the archive to whatever degree we can and working with them , we 're helping preserve my mother 's legacy , '' said Metelits , who temporarily moved back to Philadelphia from London before Stokes died . It took some time to decide on a home for his mother 's tapes , and Metelits worried the entire collection would be too big of a project for one organization . He was overjoyed when the Internet Archive 's director , Roger Macdonald , said the group would take them all . `` I almost teared up at how grateful I was . It 's just amazing that someone can use everything that my mother did , '' Metelits said . For several years , Stokes and her husband traveled back and forth between houses in Philadelphia and Boston , until finally settling permanently in Philadelphia in the late 1980s . But this did n't prevent Stokes from recording the news ; in fact , it allowed her to document historical events like the Boston busing crisis . It 's this unique collection of local and national news that makes Stokes ' tapes so `` remarkable , '' wrote Macdonald in a blog post for the Internet Archive . `` Her dream of using this collection for the public good can now be fulfilled , '' Macdonald wrote . Macdonald could not be reached for additional comment .
Philadelphia woman started recording TV news onto cassette tapes in 1977 . The collection — 140,000 tapes in total — will be digitized into an online , public library . The Internet Archive will handle the project , which will take several years and $ 2 million .