The Mission
I'm Mark, and I run Uncommon Ephemera. I've been preserving American industrial and educational filmstrips since 2019: scanning, restoring, and uploading them before the film self-destructs.
Over 1,300 filmstrips are now digitized and freely available on the Internet Archive. More than 3,000 more are waiting. The film stock, much of it Eastmancolor, is deteriorating whether or not anyone gets to it. This isn't a "someday" problem, despite everyone else treating as exactly that.
There's no collector community, no institutional mandate, no commercial revival market, and no grant money: just me, because someone, somewhere decided this part of our history wasn't worth saving.
Mark, with part of the collection
The Format
How the format worked, who used it beyond the classroom, and why losing a filmstrip means losing the only copy of what's on it.
Read More →The Process
How the scanning actually happens, what triage means in practice, and the recognition the project has received along the way.
Read More →Last year I raised $6,000 of a $30,000 goal and drove for DoorDash to close some of the gap. That work is gone. I'm not eligible for grants or foundation money. A 9-to-5 would leave no time for this. Your donations are literally what allow the work to continue.
Mark's preservation work is published on Patreon for supporters and permanently archived on the Internet Archive for everyone. He also streams weekly on Twitch.