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Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

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Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#11
I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc).

I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to document the history of a community, too.

I would jump at the chance to do work in this space full-time. What little I have done, helping friends and with my own family, was fun and rewarding. I've never been able to figure out how to finance it.

The lab described in the article and others like it handle the digitization part, but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too. The digitizing is the easier problem. Once the material is digitized I feel like it's in a lot more peril for catastrophic loss.

I think something like "digital cemeteries / memory gardens", financed by endowments that allow them to continue to operate in perpetuity, should be "a thing". I haven't thought deeply about how to make it work, but the "shallow" thinking I've done says it's financially unsustainable.

I lean toward not-for-profit because I'd like to provide the services for as close to free to the clients as possible. I think preserving family memories and records should be accessible to everyone-- not just those with significant financial means.

While I think what libraries do with these labs is laudable, I worry that the self-service aspect raises the bar too high for some people. I think having a service component, at a reasonable price, to do the digitizing and to work to preserve the material in perpetuity would be a great thing.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#12
I love the idea! So many people have old home movies, slides, and VHS tapes just sitting around collecting dust.Feel bad to throw it away but doest know what to do with them. The self-service approach is smart too—you actually learn how to preserve your own memories instead of just handing them off. Libraries are really making the practical and meaningful things. I love Boston Public Library a lot. Had to check if they have one.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#13

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?).

You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media into your account. You'd need 1000 customers with a 20% systems cost to do this full time, which seems reasonable).

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#14

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

There is a reason the Wordpress 100-year plan costs $38,000.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#15
post #3
post #2

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.

My local library can do vhs and all the various smaller form tapes that came in between like mini dv. They also support cassette tapes and the various consumer projectors people used back when home movies were just becoming a thing. They even have a large bed scanner you can fill with photos and the software will turn them into individual files.

There is a network of Memory Labs (1) and many more that are not part of the network. Check your local libraries to see if they have one. The Kansas City area has one at the Johnson County library.

1) https://memorylabnetwork.github.io

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#16

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

Find a local community church, public room, or public library and have them allow you to organize a handful of sessions where folks can bring in old devices and come up with a workflow that's efficient. Run it as a donation event where folks can donate money for a new hard drive , or to fund the service for other folks that can't afford it.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#17

I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc). I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to docum…

Set it up as a professional business (talk to funeral homes as adding it as a value service for well-to-do clients? Talk to estate lawyers?).

Once you’re making money then you expand your helping others for free or discounted.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#18
Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general.

SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior.

Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be updated regularly without much hassle.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#19

Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general. SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior. Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be u…

This might not be correct really, but since my family has less than 1 TB of media to backup, I simply have three 1TB HDDs with copies of all the stuff. I got the HDDs out of all the computers I upgraded to SSDs.

Re: Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

#20

Half related question: what's a reasonable way to store long term memories nowadays? Pictures, videos, digital data in general. SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior. Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be u…

LTO via LTFS is probably your best long term bet.

However, traditional spinning rust (multiple copies) is probably the easiest.

Sans DIY solutions, cloud infrastructure would be the costly alternative.

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