September 5, 2026

The New York Times Profiles Uncommon Ephemera’s Race to Save America’s Filmstrips

Arts-section feature profiles the one-person archive alongside a Europe-wide university project to recover a format "almost completely written out of history"

JOHNSON CITY, NY - September 5, 2026 - The New York Times today published "Remember Filmstrips? These Dedicated Souls Are Racing to Save Them," a feature by Christian Kriticos in the paper's Arts section on the effort to preserve industrial and educational filmstrips before the last surviving copies deteriorate. The article profiles Uncommon Ephemera founder Mark O'Brien and his archive of almost 5,000 filmstrips, and pairs his work with that of Professor Tom Rice of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who helps lead the Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe project with universities and museums across the continent.

Filmstrips, the article notes, were one of the biggest media formats of the twentieth century. By 1975 the American filmstrip industry was worth almost $65 million, roughly $400 million today, and companies including Disney and Hanna-Barbera, along with big and small filmstrip-focused publishers who are now all out of business, produced them for classrooms, churches, businesses and civic groups. When VHS arrived in the 1980s, schools and institutions threw them out in large numbers, and the overwhelming majority of the format's output has since been lost, along with the record it held of how twentieth-century America taught its children about health, science, history and society, and quickly delivered training material and new technical information to business and industry.

The piece describes the physical urgency behind the work. Many surviving filmstrips were printed on Eastmancolor stock whose dye layers fade over time and whose binder – a hardened chemical coating that keeps the dye layers in place – breaks down into a slime, permanently destroying the images held on the film. O'Brien provided Kriticos with examples that had shrunk, curled, crumbled, molded or liquefied beyond recovery. A single full restoration, from scanning, through color correction, audio synchronization to frame-to-frame animation, takes about twelve hours. O'Brien has digitized roughly a third of his collection to date and makes all of it freely available on the Internet Archive.

"A lot of the great work that is being done to keep filmstrips alive is by amateurs," Rice said to the Times about O'Brien. "I'm reluctant to even use the word 'amateur,' because I think they often have more expertise than most of us."

"I can sit here and scan filmstrips until I'm 90 years old," O'Brien said in the article. "I don't mind doing the work. I'm actually pretty stubborn about it. Because nobody is saving them. This format needs somebody."

From his home office in upstate New York, O'Brien praises Kriticos and the Times for seeing value in telling the format's story. "Since 2019, when I realized that even at this late date no one was saving these films, I've been telling anyone who would listen that this format was disappearing and that no institution was interested in saving it," he said. "Having the Times put that in front of its readers, next to a well-funded, well-known project reaching the same conclusion in Europe, is the most visibility the plight of the format has ever had. There's still years of work to do, and a desperate need for funding and awareness in the United States, but now, at least, more people know the problem exists."

The archive remains a one-person operation funded by its audience. Every restored filmstrip is published free of charge on the Internet Archive, and a full catalog of the collection, including titles not yet digitized, is searchable at Uncommon Ephemera's sister project The Internet Filmstrip Database, at filmstrips.org. Readers who want to support the work can do so at uncommonephemera.org/donate.

The article appeared in the online edition of the Times on September 4, 2026, and appeared in the print edition the next day.

About Uncommon Ephemera

Uncommon Ephemera is a media preservation initiative focused on saving American educational and industrial filmstrips. All preserved materials are made freely available through the Internet Archive, and a growing comprehensive collection of information about the titles released on the format is being built at its sister project The Internet Filmstrip Database. For more information, visit uncommonephemera.org.

Links:

Media Contact:

Mark O'Brien
[email protected]