Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

Many libraries or library systems actually have something like this. In the Bay Area, the large Santa Clara Library does and at least had regular drop-in hours.

Super, super cool initiative.

I would be interested to know what capture hardware they're using. As someone who took on this project for my own family's videos, I ended up using the Canopus ADVC-110, which captures composite (or S-Video) NTSC (plus stereo audio) and generates DV, which you can then capture over FireWire.

It worked well for me since it didn't require any non-built-in drivers on macOS (though I hear Tahoe drops FireWire support entirely -- boo), and it therefore was easily interoperable with FFmpeg, VLC, and custom AVFoundation code I wrote.

Unfortunately, I don't think the ADVC-110 is made anymore, and my experiments with various USB Video Class devices (which would be similarly interoperable), mostly based on MacroSilicon chips like the MS210x, were utter failures in terms of quality.

My local makerspace is building a memory lab. It's very cool. In addition to the obvious "let's get that old media that's becoming harder and harder to play and/or is degrading digitized", there's some really cool stuff you can do.

A very useful on is workshops - older folks are often the keepers of the family archive and aren't comfortable using technology at all, so teaching them not just how to use the equipment, but also safe-keep the digital product (backups, etc) is important. Additionally teaching concepts like infinite free reproduction is helpful because many older folks I've talked to stress about how to divvy up the archive among the children/grandchildren/etc, and are delighted at the idea of "everyone gets all of it", and are also delighted at the idea of "make a family archive that includes a more extended group of people and their archive combined".

Other cool things we've explored and/or are planning to explore:

* making collages and memes and digital scrapbooks for the family as a way of telling the family history/story, doubly cool because you don't have to sacrifice the only copy of a picture to do so. People feel liberated to do some really interesting things.

* having digitization be a community process by hosting regular memory-lab nights. Digitizing everything is a daunting task sometimes. There may be a lot of material. There may be a lot of context that one wants to capture with the material (labeling photos, explaining the photo, etc - I've heard some great stories from the old-timers as we digitize their photos). Not all memories are good ones... sometimes someone will get to a photo and it brings up bad memories. One woman was very glad we were there when we got to a section of her photos of her child who had died and we were able to give her a hug and let her cry and talk about it, and help her work through a difficult thing while preserving the memories.

* I've often heard tech people say "sometimes its hard to do skilled volunteer work with my tech skills...", particularly in a way that is also social and community-building. Helping in these sorts of community digitization processes is a nice way to use your skills and also bond with community members.

This is AWESOME and I see from the comments that "Memory Lab" is a more or less standard thing. Ties in really neatly with the recent personal encyclopedia post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522173

At the end of last year I took the old VCR and VHS home movies from the 90s out of my mom's basement and digitized them using this cheap converter[0]. I also had to get some rubbing alcohol and foam swabs to clean the VCR heads, which only took a few minutes[1] (some of the older tapes would play normally for a moment before the quality degraded into poor tracking and static). My family enjoyed watching them.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB6BW6X4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ClXrffkN3M