Richmond Public Library is ready to turn forgotten memories into living history.

The Memory Lab began in 2019 at RPL’s main branch as a public service to citizens who couldn’t afford expensive media transferring services. Housed in the library’s computer lab, it was a modest one-person workstation with limited capabilities. But last year, the library received a $900,000 “Public Knowledge” grant from the Mellon Foundation to give the enterprise a serious upgrade.

“It enables us to help the community preserve its memories and perhaps even unearth some hidden Richmond history,” says Ben Himmelfarb, the main branch’s library and community services manager. “People can use the Memory Lab themselves, and we commit to having someone here as a guide by the side if they need it.”

Everyone has personal artifacts rotting in their basement or attic: old VHS tapes, Super 8 films, vacation slides, cassettes, crumbling documents. The Memory Lab is open six days a week, 9-5 p.m., with evening hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, to help capture and save these images and sounds …. for free. “It’s the perfect place for people to come in and do personal history or personal digitization projects,” Himmelfarb says.

“We’ve now expanded to four workstations in the Special Collections room,” says Chloe McCormick, senior Special Collections librarian. “And we now have almost all of the different tech you can think of to handle things like beta, slides, 8mm film, reel-to-reel tape. We recently purchased a microcassette player. We also have personal archiving kits for folks to check out, with cameras, tripods, audio recorders and personal scanners, so that they can archive their memories at home or in their neighborhoods.” Anyone checking out these items would need to be a library card holder in good standing, she says, while the Memory Lab itself is free to all.

According to McCormick and Himmelfarb, people have so far used the lab to rescue fading photos of long gone ancestors, VHS tapes of family gatherings, films of sporting events, audio speeches by political leaders—a wide range of personal and historical arcana. “We have someone who comes in and digitizes old [music] mixtapes,” says Himmelfarb. “He makes high-quality copies of the covers too.”

The Mellon grant also enables the library to use the lab to collect Richmond history. It has established the Community Contributions Collection—you can follow the initial discoveries on the library’s website at https://rvalibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/memorylab/search, and the lab is also in the process of digitizing and making available the archives of many of Richmond’s city departments, such as Parks and Rec.

“If we see that what you are saving is of historical interest to Richmond, we’ll ask for a digital copy for the collection,” McCormick says. Often, she adds, people don’t even know what they have is of historical interest. “You might have photographs of the Fan district in the ’70s of someone’s child riding a bike, but you can view the entire block behind them and see how things have changed.” It could be a unique view valuable to future researchers.

It’s all about finding “little bits of history” like these, says writer Dale Brumfield, who sits on the Memory Lab’s community board (and is a frequent contributor to Style Weekly). “We’re looking to fill in those missing gaps and the hope is that people can find these bits, and are willing to share them with the library. When you start looking through people’s attics and storage containers, you start to find these things. This stuff is out there. Right now, it’s all about letting people know about this unique service.”

When someone makes an appointment to use the Memory Lab, they are asked to fill out a booking form that gives the staff a heads-up on what kind of material will be transferred and what kind of format is needed. “A staff member guides them through the process and explains how it works,” Himmelfarb says, adding that the library is sensitive to the fact that some people, particularly older visitors, are daunted by working with new technology. “There is someone downstairs at all times to help them and available for any questions,” McCormick stresses. “Some independent patrons like to do it themselves and sometimes you have to pull up a chair and work with them on the process.”

One of those helpers pulling up a chair is Community Memory Fellow Marvin Hicks, whose position is funded by the five-year Mellon grant. “We see all sorts of people,” he says, “from young people who find something in their grandparents’ basement, or uncover a tape in a thrift store and are curious about what’s on it, to older people who are scanning all of their family’s memories.” He recalls one couple who spent weeks in the Lab cataloging everything in their ancestral archive.

“We encourage people to bring in their neighbors or family members and turn it into a shared experience,” McCormick says. “Groups of families and neighbors can come in and do a group scanning session.” She says that the long-term goal is to eventually take the lab out to other city library branches. Currently, the lab averages four or five appointments per week. Each appointment time slot is four hours. “Four or five appointments may not seem like a lot, but it can be about 25 hours a week.” Potential users should be prepared to have a way to save their media, such as a USB drive or access to an online dropbox.

While the Memory Lab is free, it’s not always quick. “We don’t have a fast forward button,” Himmelfarb says. “It takes a while to get good scans of, say, color slides. Because they are so small, you have to scan them at high DPI.” The Lab does have huge scanners that allow a visitor to load up to 40 slides at a time, but it still takes some time.

“One reason that we have the lab in this comfortable space [the Special Collections Room] is that it’s very personal,” he says. “People are often digitizing things that have to do with their personal history and sometimes people are seeing things, and finding out information. for the very first time. It can be like taking a personal journey.”

For more on the Memory Lab at Richmond Public Library’s main branch, or to book an appointment, go to https://rvalibrary.org/services/memory-lab/