Join Bobbi this week as we debut the Memory Lab, a new way to digitally preserve your family's history and optical media.
Transcript:
Hi! This is Bobbi with the Vespasian Warner Public Library District, and I'm here for another Tale from the Archives, where we talk about objects and documents from our local history collection.
Today, we are downstairs on our lower level in our local history and genealogy room, and we are debuting our Memory Lab.
A lot of us have wonderful family histories and family moments that are trapped on things like old VHS tapes, or Super 8 reels, or film negatives, or you might not have the photographs anymore. And I don't know about you, I don't have a VHS player anymore, or any way to actually enjoy these memories, and more importantly, preserve them for future generations. And that's where the Memory Lab steps in.
And I will note, this Memory Lab was paid for by a very generous grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation.
Here is everything that you need to digitize and preserve your family's memories.
We have this, a Wolverine film-to-digital movie maker. This takes your old Super 8 reels, and will actually convert them to a digital file that you can then burn on a CD or put on a flash drive.
We have this little Tape Express converter, that will allow you to digitize anything on an audio cassette.
I really love this one: this is for slides, but it's also for film negatives, so you can digitize your slides, and you can take film negatives and actually turn them into positives, so you get an actual color image from this.
We have a VCR that comes with a converter where you can digitize anything you have on a VHS cassette.
And we have, over here, an overhead scanner. This scanner is great for photographs, for scrapbooks, for old family cookbooks, anything you have like that, that you need to scan.
And all of these are available down in our lower level. We just ask you to sign in at the circulation desk, and we do ask you to provide your own CD or DVD or flash drive. If you do not have one with you, you can purchase a CD from us for a quarter each, but if you have a Google Drive or a Dropbox or anything like that, you can also just move your digital images or files into that.
A couple of little caveats: no copyrighted material. You can't bring your old Disney VHS tapes in and digitize them here, it can only be things from your family history. And it's all done in real-time, so if you have a two-hour wedding video, you will have to be here for the full two hours, so bring a book, or use one of our wonderful books that we have here. We're very excited, we can't wait for people to start using this and preserving their memories.
If you have any questions, you can, of course, give us a call at 217-935-5174, send us a message on Facebook, send us an email at library@vwarner.org, or come in and see us.
So thank you for joining me for this Tale from the Archives, and we hope to see you soon!