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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Unfortunately devices like the VuPoint - while low cost and accessible - deliver impressively terrible results. It’s a composite to usb converter which will fail to handle delinterlacing and get the colors wrong.
The best bet for people who aren’t going to build a domesday duplicator (which decodes the VHS signal in software), is to stick to technology from the era. Such as later released VHS players which had FireWire out or could even burn a dvd.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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
looks like DC's PL has had one since 2024 https://www.dclibrary.org/using-the-library/digital-preserva...
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.
Looks like Santa Clara is using the VuPoint Digital Video Converter -- not familiar with this one, so I'll have to look into it.
https://www.sclibrary.org/services/other-services/vhs-conver...
Unfortunately devices like the VuPoint - while low cost and accessible - deliver impressively terrible results. It’s a composite to usb converter which will fail to handle delinterlacing and get the colors wrong.
The best bet for people who aren’t going to build a domesday duplicator (which decodes the VHS signal in software), is to stick to technology from the era. Such as later released VHS players which had FireWire out or could even burn a dvd.
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.