Join us in the WPL Memory Lab!

Are some of your most precious memories of friends and family stored in plastic totes or cardboard boxes in your basement or attic? And are these memories printed on photographic paper that’s quickly aging or recorded on a VHS tape that has already exceeded its expected life span? Maybe the pictures from your family vacations are only on slides or 8 mm tape and you don’t actually have a slide or film projector anymore? The Washington Public Library Memory Lab can help!

The Library’s Memory Lab is part of the MakeIT Place located in the lower level of the Library. The Memory Lab is a collection of equipment that can be used for converting different kinds of recordings (video and audio), pictures and documents to digital files that can be stored on a USB drive or SD card. Equipment includes an Epson Expression 13000XL flatbed scanner, a Ricoh ScanSnap SV600 overhead scanner, as well as various peripherals and software programs for digitizing video from DVD, VHS and 8 mm film formats and sound from cassette tapes. To learn more about the Memory Lab equipment you can take a look at the Library’s MakeIT Place Memory Lab page. If you want more of a “hands-on” experience feel free to attend one of the Library’s quick MakeIT Place tours on Tuesdays at 5:30 or Thursdays at noon.

Most days when you visit the Memory Lab you’ll meet Mark Keedy, our volunteer Memory Lab “expert.” Mark is a former resident of Washington and was employed as a photographer for the Washington Evening Journal (WEJ) back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. What started out as a moment of idle curiosity about whatever happened to the film from the days he was taking pictures for the WEJ has turned into a mission to digitize the WEJ film and negatives from 1957 to about 2004. These 50,000 or so images were fortunately safely stored (after being rescued by Mike Zahs) in the University of Iowa Library Special Collections department and are being lent a bit at a time to WPL for digitization and cataloging.

Mark’s ongoing work can be seen on the Washington Public Library Memory Lab Facebook and Instagram pages and eventually will be uploaded to Fortepan Iowa photo archive, as well as appearing in the U of I Special Collections catalog. You can see images already loaded onto Fortepan Iowa from Washington County on the Library’s web page (choose Local Photos from Washington County from the Research & Learn menu). If you’re interested in helping Mark with his work, either digitizing or researching the old photos, please fill out a volunteer application and become a Memory Lab Assistant.

Ready to get started preserving YOUR memories? You can call the library to schedule a brief overview of the equipment you’d like to use, or make an online reservation from the Memory Lab page. The first time you visit, a library staff member or volunteer will give you a brief overview of the equipment and you can get started on your work. Keep in mind that materials that are copyrighted may not be duplicated, so that old VHS tape of The Little Mermaid or cassette tape of the Best of the ‘70s isn’t a candidate for digitization!