Inheriting an Archive

My best friend has a tendency to send me videos she finds entertaining that she thinks will amuse me. You’ll be shocked to learn that she’s usually right, being my best friend and all. Recently, she sent me one about a woman who’d inherited her father’s entire movie collection. Tens of thousands of VHS tapes; thousands of DVDs. An entire packed basement room with shelf after shelf of physical media. It was breathtaking and it was clear that this woman had no idea what to do with it. My best friend looked it up; the woman’s selling it off piecemeal on eBay.

Look, I don’t expect the woman to keep an entire basement archive full of movies she doesn’t care about. That’s a big ask and I know it. But my first thought—after “gimme!”—was that it belongs in a museum. For preference, it should be in the library collection of a university that has a good media studies program, because just perusing the woman’s eBay account got me thinking of all the papers you could write about that collection. It’s amazing; it’s obviously from a passionate collector and it tells you a lot about ‘90s media just from what little I saw.

I know not everyone thinks that way. I’m sure this woman thinks of it as an enormous burden she’s stuck dealing with. My grandmother was a hoarder, and it took probably decades to finish clearing out her stuff. I will say that this doesn’t look like my grandmother’s collection. These are on custom-built shelves, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re organized within that. Oh, possibly in a way that only really made sense to her father, but that’s still better than my grandmother got. I know, because my grandmother was constantly losing and re-finding things. It was in boxes in “Grandma’s Chamber of Horrors” or in storage sheds in the yard.

The woman whose video this is says that it includes things he got from his local library, including documentaries, and that makes it even more valuable. I say this as someone deeply familiar with the contents of my own local library system’s DVD collection. This doubtless contains locally-made stuff, documentaries about the community that are inaccessible anywhere else. I’m terrified that this woman might just be throwing those out, when the important thing is to digitize them and make them accessible, or at least put them in the hands of people who would know what they have.

I know that it can be rough to have your father die and suddenly inherit, you know, a massive film archive that’s a project beyond what you’re capable of. Even the idea of keeping it for a while and dealing with it later probably felt like a lot. I just despair at the idea of a collection like this being broken up, because we could learn a lot from it. I wish her father had thought to make this arrangement in his will; someone who made a collection like that is more likely to understand its importance.