If you’ve held on to your old photos/negatives, VHS videos, cassettes and floppy disks, this may come as very good news, especially if live near the nation’s capital. The new Memory Lab at DC’s flagship Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library let’s you digitize your precious memories and put them on a thumb drive to take home — for free. Dean Essner with the Washingtonian reports:
At the Memory Lab, which opened last Monday, anyone with a DC Public Library card can digitize their personal archives for free. Previously inaccessible VHS tapes, floppy discs, audio cassettes, and photo negatives can now be viewed on a computer screen and shared on a thumb drive, giving new life to things that seemed lost to time and changing technologies.
Three-hour blocks of time are being offered to the public in the newest addition to the library’s Digital Commons section. Essner says, “It gives users access to expensive equipment like three-dimensional printers and on-demand book-printing free of charge.”
“People take for granted that whatever is happening now will always be,” says Jamie Mears, the archivist behind the construction of the lab. “It’s not until you use a VCR that you haven’t seen for ten years first hand that the threat of obsolescence to personal archives really sinks in.”
Mears hopes the concept will also encourage people to take a hard look at how they are archiving their photos today. Memory Lab users are often seen becoming emotional as they view photos and videos from the past. The library staff is available for assistance, but privacy and space are also given.