Questions I get asked a lot.

Filmstrips were arguably the first multimedia format. For most of the twentieth century, nearly every American classroom, church, sales office and training room had a projector, and filmstrips carried a picture of the country that exists in few other places: what children were taught, what companies wanted their people to believe, and a snapshot of the culture.

When audiovisual technology progressed, much of it went into the trash. Almost nobody kept it, and much of the film that survived is now shrinking, fading and going brittle. As far as I can find, nobody else is doing this at scale.

There are large, vibrant communities of amateurs and professionals preserving every other format: VHS, records, audiocassettes, 16mm short subjects, 8mm home movies and commercially-released cartoons and public information films. There is no difference in importance, cultural context, and nostalgic value between those formats and filmstrip, and with all the attention paid to these other formats, no reason filmstrips shouldn't also be saved.

No. While I am unequivocally grateful for the wonderful article in the New York Times in September 2026, the article overstated this point. I didn't leave a career for this. Due to several factors, including the regional economy and the fact that I am on the autism spectrum, I never had one worth staying in, and I've been open about why.

Additionally, I was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 after a long battle with chronic fatigue, which was the immediate reason I left the conventional job I was in at that time. Symptoms didn't subside for several years, and have not fully subsided yet. In that time I needed something that I could do with limited energy to maintain a sense of purpose, and I knew at least I could put film through a scanner and do some good while I hoped for recovery.

This work has also been more rewarding than any conventional job I had. People on the spectrum run into a particular kind of soft bigotry: unless you make a point of your challenges, the people around you assume you have the same resources they do, and then judge your shortcomings as if you had chosen them. I spent years being "just a little off" in workplaces where that was the whole evaluation. Here, the work is judged on its merits. The decisions are mine, they are made for the mission, and the results are on the Internet Archive for anyone to see.

Every filmstrip I have scanned is on the Internet Archive, available for free, with the soundtrack wherever one survives, but due to limitations of their system it's easier to visit them through the Collections page on this site. Restored versions go up on the Internet Archive and my YouTube channel as they are finished, and Patreon supporters get early access to them and other perks.

The catalog of the whole collection, including the thousands not yet scanned, is at The Internet Filmstrip Database. You can search by title, publisher, and other attributes.

Yes, please. Educational, industrial, religious, sales training, I want them all. Extremely ephemeral subjects like home economics, sex education, venereal disease/sexually-transmitted disease, and social skills are the rarest of the rare and are at even more risk of being lost than the average title. Please send me a message using my contact form. I may ask for photos or more information when I reply. The records and cassettes that came with them matter as much as the film, so please prepare to send those along as well.

At this time, funding is the most important thing to keep the work going. Donations are what let me work on this full time instead of taking a job that would leave no time for it. My Donate page has links to my GoFundMe, Patreon, Venmo and PayPal.

If money is not an option, the second most important thing is raising awareness. Word of mouth, sharing what I do on social media or Facebook groups, sharing restored filmstrips on YouTube, all help raise awareness about the work.

If you're more hands-on, join my Discord. There I can have you help me process scans for restoration, help write metadata for Internet Archive items, identify some non-filmstrip media I'm also trying to save, and more. You can also check the How To Help page for more ideas.

I'd really rather not, but at this late date, if I don't, they're as good as gone. Many of the filmstrips I've saved, and most of those still waiting, were printed on a terrible film stock called Eastmancolor, which is notorious for self-destructing. The dyes start fading unevenly after about twenty years, which leaves the film a deep shade of magenta and makes some titles impossible to color-correct. Depending on where the film was stored, somewhere between thirty and fifty years in, the film base itself starts to fail. Sometimes it turns sticky and the dye layers begin to move, destroying the images they once held. Sometimes it simply shrinks, pulling the roll down to the diameter of a cigarette, and film in that state often crumbles apart when handled.

Scanning a filmstrip properly means cutting it into shorter strips that fit the film carriers of a flatbed scanner made for 35mm photo negatives, because the equipment that scans a strip intact at this quality costs tens of thousands of dollars, more than this project has ever had. You can see from the filmstrips I've fully restored that this still produces excellent results.

If I didn't do it this way, I wouldn't have been able to save any filmstrips, which would mean you wouldn't know about this effort to save them, which would mean I would never be able to afford equipment that would allow me to save these films without cutting them.

Museums, archives, nonprofits, and other institutions had fifty-plus years and better equipment to save them, and they didn't. What I'm doing isn't even preservation in the traditional sense, it's triage. This format has been so neglected, part of the urgent nature of the work is simply documenting what's left of it. I would rather have a good scan of something I saved at a cost determined by others' negligence than have an intact filmstrip that is lost forever because I didn't do it the "right" way.

I don't want to do it this way, but so far I've had to. If enough people feel strongly about this, then this problem is easily solved: the equipment to do it the "right" way exists, and helping me afford it would absolutely change my position on this, and the relatively few titles that still exist could be saved without this being a concern.

I am fascinated by the progress of technology and enjoy keeping up with what new AI tools can do in every aspect. Sadly, many people treat AI the way they treat religion or politics: either a hard allegiance to it, or an irrational total resistance, with no tolerance for discussion or nuance. I think it's slightly more complicated than that.

One hard line I do have is that AI tools never change an original scan of a frame of film. The scan is a historical record, and anything that changes a scanned image or invents things that aren't there destroys that record. Because the of the limitations of the scanning methods I can currently afford, I have to hand-deskew and crop overscan from the images for restoration. I have long desired an automatic tool that will help with that mundane, never-ending work. But despite all the things AI can do, for some reason it still can't do that correctly. This will certainly change someday soon, but the original scans are always kept as a historical record, and are uploaded unmodified to the Internet Archive no matter what other derivative work I perform with them.

Where these tools are actually helpful to me is in assisting with system administration on the backend. While I do have decades of IT and web design experience, limited responsible use of AI tools and LLMs has helped immensely in keeping the parts of this work you don't see running smoothly. Since 2019 I have begged for a few volunteers who could help with that sort of stuff, but that help has not been available to me. Supervised, limited use of AI on certain backend tooling has allowed me to create a better and larger archive of these endangered films at a faster rate than if I had to go back to school to learn the latest programming languages, fight with poorly documented and open-source software with convoluted interfaces and options, and hunt down every bug or edge case for a workflow few other people have.

People who have limited technical experience tend to use AI irresponsibly for IT-related tasks. We've all heard horror stories of non-technical people "vibe coding" public applications that are easily exploited because they didn't know to check that an LLM left database credentials in a public web root, or left a test page there that allowed full access to administrative functions. Because I spent most of my adult life in IT, systems design, and web design, I know not to do that, but I also strive not to use AI for the complete creation of custom applications available to the public. I also believe in keeping multiple full backups of my infrastructure in multiple remote private locations that I have full control over (no public cloud backups), so in the rare case of a problem I can restore any necessary data immediately.

All the scanning, scan processing, filmstrip restoration, color-correction, social media post creation, and video creation is still done by hand, by me.

One of the reasons I am pro-AI for these limited use cases is because of the limited interest in media preservation, plus the challenges of raising awareness of what I do, I have never found any volunteers willing to help me maintain infrastructure, write and audit custom code, build custom tools, and help me plan future expansion. Famous media archivists, popular YouTubers, and people working on more mainstream topics tend to be overwhelmed with people willing to help them. Because of these limitations, I have chosen not to let this project fail because it doesn't have the help it needs; I've chosen to do what I need to do with the resources that are available to me, while at the same time being careful and conservative with how I use it, informed by my experience, so that this work can continue to be done. Of course, there's nothing scandalous, funny, or interesting about someone using AI responsibly, so workflows like mine are not discussed in the news and on social media, while stories of people who fail because they used it irresponsibly spread like wildfire.

The technologies that power AI are evolving at an unprecedented rate, and there may be different opportunities to enhance what I do in the future. But at the current time I do not see a way for those tools to assist in any of the things I'm doing by hand. And even if they do, the original scans must never be modified. I continue to be interested in technological progress, but I'm very risk-averse about it, and the mission continues to be about saving historical records as accurately as I can.

I have looked at every applicable grant I can find. Nearly every preservation, digitization and archival grant in the United States is written for institutions: a museum, a library, a university, with a building, staff and a track record. Every one of them explicitly forbids individuals from applying, except for a few that accept individuals from underrepresented groups, and I am not in one.

For part of 2026, I had nonprofit status through a fiscal sponsor, which is a method by which I could act as a nonprofit under the umbrella of a sponsoring organization. At that point, I reviewed all the grants again, and learned that they also explicitly exclude fiscally sponsored entities. What is left is a few micro-grants worth a thousand dollars or so each. I apply for those when they fit, but they do not in any way meaningfully cover my needs.

I looked into it, and for part of 2026 I had nonprofit status through a fiscal sponsor. It turns out the paperwork is the easy part. The problem is that the grants aren't written for nonprofits, they're written for institutions, and a letter from the IRS wouldn't make me one of those.

Even if I could get around that, a nonprofit is required by law to have a board of directors. Even if I had people who could be my board of directors, I would in practice have to transfer ownership of everything I've done since 2019 to them, and then they would have to decide to hire me to continue doing all the work. That doesn't sound like a reasonable thing to do in any way.

If a board of directors can hire you, they can also fire you, and they can take an organization in a direction its founder never intended.

Every preservation nonprofit in the country already has a board of directors, and in more than fifty years this material never made it onto any of their agendas. The media I've already saved has been saved because it didn't need anyone's permission. Putting a board between me and the scanner would restore the roadblock that kept these filmstrips from being saved in the first place.

We have many options these days to remove these risks from a project like this. The internet allows me to plead my case directly to the people. Platforms like Patreon and GoFundMe allow me to secure funding without destroying the mission and the momentum. And the Internet Archive makes it possible to safeguard these films without spending time fighting with gatekeepers instead of saving more films. The only thing we all have to do is raise awareness of the plight of this endangered media so I can reach more people who can help keep the work funded.

In order to succeed at anything, one has to know their strengths and weaknesses. Cold-calling people who don't already have an interest in what I'm doing is one of my weaknesses. Whenever I've tried contacting a university, museum, archive, or other institution, I don't get anywhere. What has worked for me is showing people I have done the work, and doing my best to work with them when they have an interest in helping.

There are other, much more practical concerns: A university or museum with the equipment I need is chartered to use that equipment for the betterment of their students or patrons. With so many films to save, I'd be using their equipment 40 hours a week or more for months if not years. No one is going to let me do that. Plus, anyone who allowed that sort of use of their facilities or equipment is going to want to trade me the access for ownership of the work, which invites a litany of issues, from everyday decision-making to how the work is presented or accessed. The only answer is to stay independent and do the work as it should be done.

Most importantly, institutions had fifty-plus years to save this material and didn't. One person with a scanner can. The door is open to any of them, provided the work stays in the public interest and there are no strings attached. But the endangered nature of the media means I cannot wait on any specific organization to realize its importance.

No. This is an archive, not a service, and I don't take commissions or scan private collections. Everything I have goes into the filmstrips and other media I am saving.

For your personal photos and negatives, a local photo lab will do just as good a job. Make sure to ask for scans in TIFF format, which is lossless. For film, cool, dry and dark storage in archival sleeves will protect your film for the foreseeable future. If your material has historical value, you're better off asking your local historical society to help.

If you actually have filmstrips, please consider donating them to me.

Copyright is a complicated gray area when it comes to preservation of material whose storage medium won't last until the copyright expires. I take intellectual property rights very seriously and am willing to work with verified copyright holders if they have an issue with any of the media I'm saving.

Almost all of these filmstrips were made by companies that no longer exist, for a format that has been dead for forty years, and nobody has been able to buy them for decades. The publishers that survive have shown no interest in them, with one exception: Scholastic, Inc. They are the only publisher ever to file a DMCA claim against this work, which caused material to be from YouTube and the Internet Archive. Because of how most platforms enforce the DMCA, a claim like that puts every other filmstrip I've saved at risk, so I no longer save anything Scholastic owns. That includes the excellent. high-quality catalog of Weston Woods, a defunct Connecticut publisher whose assets Scholastic now holds. If Scholastic ever decides to preserve those titles itself, I would be glad to see it.

There is no exemption in copyright law for this work the way there are limited ones for abandoned software, often called "abandonware," and I encourage lawmakers to consider the plight of abandoned films, for which no negatives are publicly available, especially if they are printed on Eastmancolor stock. The reality is, most of the film I'm trying to preserve won't last long enough for the copyright to expire, or for any of us to find the right person to give me permission to save it.

In the time I've been doing this, I've heard from many people who worked in the filmstrip industry, thanking me for saving it. None of them have condemned the work or asked me to remove anything from the collection.

If you hold the rights to something in the archive and want it removed, write to me. I take requests from verifiable owners seriously and act on them.

The Internet Archive already hosts all the materials I preserve. I was also featured in their 2024 Vanishing Culture Report, where I wrote the chapter on filmstrips.

As a rule, they cannot and do not support the day-to-day financial needs of independent archivists nor fundraise on their behalf, and they are so backlogged with their own preservation work that they cannot take on preservation of any of the media I have.

I am very grateful to those at the Internet Archive who are providing invaluable assistance in saving these endangered films.

Yes. Nobody ever asks Rick Prelinger whether he has heard of the Smithsonian, and for the same reason: it is where the field starts.

But here's the distinction nobody thinks about: Prelinger's archive is motion-picture film, scanned on equipment built for motion-picture film. Filmstrips need different machines, a different workflow, and its own support system.

No, and not for lack of admiration. Skip has spent decades saving 16mm industrial shorts, but 16mm and filmstrips need entirely different equipment. His scanner cannot run my film and mine cannot run his.

More importantly is the small matter of how introductions work. A cold e-mail from a stranger asking for help is the same e-mail he gets every day. What gets a busy archivist's attention is either the work itself or someone whose opinion he trusts telling him it matters. If you are that someone, that is the most useful thing you could possibly do, and not doing it hurts the entire media preservation community and risks more media being lost forever.

Probably not, and that's not necessarily a failure.

Everyone in this field is one person and a pile of film, and the well-known ones get cold e-mails from strangers every day. I am not good at cold-calling, and it hasn't worked when i've tried. What makes a real contact is either a body of work, which I am building, or a person whose opinion they trust telling them it matters. If you know one of them, your endorsement of my work is what gets that contact made, not me sending the same message they've gotten every day for a decade.

I had one. Between that, my family, a 2018 cancer diagnosis, and the responsibilities of being an adult, there was no time for this work. Then I tried to transition to gig work that I could schedule around the needs of this work, but the gig companies changed their terms and the local economy did the rest. During those times, it went about how you would expect: the scanner sat idle for months, the film kept deteriorating, and I came home too tired to do the one thing I am actually good at.

One thousand people, out of more than eight billion worldwide, contributing just $100 a year would fund everything this work needs and keep my electricity and grocery bills paid. That is fewer people than watch a mid-sized streamer eat lunch or set his apartment on fire. The internet raises more money than that in a few days for whoever is in the news that week, and it has done so for convicted murderers, politicians, and people whose entire business model is engagement. I'm not asking for one multi-million-dollar weekend. I'm asking for the price of one streaming subscription, from a small number of people who think a century of American filmstrips is worth saving.

None, and it never will. YouTube does not monetize a channel that consists mostly of restored archival film, so there are no ads on mine and no revenue from them. A restored filmstrip takes about twelve hours to produce and earns nothing directly.

YouTube is how people find the work, and I am happy for that. The work itself gets paid for through the Donate page.

They're listed for a lot of money, because eBay sellers believe they're "antiques." When they do sell, they often end up in the hands of people who don't know what they are, and sit on a shelf for the purpose of making the owner seem like an old soul.

Anything I sold would go to a collector who does not do media preservation, and the historical record would get one title shorter just so I could have lunch. If the impulse behind the suggestion is to help fund the work, a donation is the version of this idea that does not shrink the archive or put more of this format at risk.

AI cannot feed physical film into a scanner, it cannot help me afford better scanning equipment, it can't un-shrink damaged film, and so far it cannot reliably repair scans of damaged film without inventing detail that does not exist on the original. For archival work, a historical record of the actual film must exist, and as a first step, must be saved without modification. When the film finally self-destructs, as most of it will in the next few decades, a scan may be the only copy of it left.

If, someday, AI tools will be able to assist with restoration, it will still need original scans to work from, and most importantly, that scan has to be made while there is still something to scan.

In order for AI tools to do anything, they need to be trained on the real-life examples of that thing. Filmstrips have been so neglected and forgotten, AI models in 2026 still have no reference for what they are. You can test this yourself: do a Google image search for "filmstrip projector," then ask your favorite AI image generator to create a photo of a filmstrip projector. It can't, and it won't ever be able to unless we do the work to document the format. Only after that can we really evaluate whether it can help in the future.

While I am not radically pro- or anti-AI, I believe it's important for someone in my position to understand what these tools can and cannot do properly. This requires being responsible with the technology and introducing only into tasks it can provably do without making things worse. At this point, for me, that is limited to some systems administration work, backend tooling, assistance with research and data organization. 

AI is also a touchy subject at the moment, and engenders radical opinions and reactions similar to discussions around politics or religion. Regardless of how it is used, there's a sizable segment of people who think it can do everything, and an equally sizable segment who is revolted by any use of it. While I truly believe the answer is somewhere in the middle, I also have to be careful that people's personal feelings around it don't endanger my ability to get support. The bottom line at this time is, no AI tool is appropriate for direct work on the film itself, and won't ever be unless and until humans create a comprehensive reference of every last detail of the format. Even still, AI only works when appropriately prompted, which is often complicated to get just right, and changes every time a new model is released. There will need to be a human expert in the loop for the foreseeable future.

If a "real archive" was interested in saving this format, this project literally wouldn't need to exist.

Many people, unfortunately, think that archivists, museums, and other institutions sit around scrolling TikTok waiting for someone to send them work to do, which they then happily accept and do for free. The reality couldn't be further from this fantasy: Every archivist and preservationist working today has decades of work waiting for them to have the time and the resources to get to it. Archival isn't like a snapping a photo on your phone. It takes time and specialized equipment to make very high-quality digital copies of the originals, which often need to be further processed to create the end product one sees in a museum or archive. Archivists and preservationists are often underfunded, and often need to set aside the actual preservation to chase after donors, grants, and underwriting.

And it's disingenuous to imply that this work isn't at a "real" archive. The Internet Archive is real, and they have been providing storage for this collection since 2020. However, every day they receive more material than they can save. More people doing the work, and supporting those who do, is the answer.