By Michelle Metcalf
Public Relations and Marketing
Have you long desired to preserve your cherished family memories? It may seem like a daunting task. A quick search online will reveal the best way to save your old photos, videos and slides is to make digital copies of them. If you follow that up with another quick search to find the best way to go about it, you’ll get results for dozens of websites and apps that that offer help with your project… for a fee. To top it off, alongside those results will be sponsored ads for expensive, high quality scanners that stores would like to sell to you. There has to be a better, easier and cheaper way, right?
There is — it’s called the Preservation Studio, located at the Northern Onondaga Public Library (NOPL) at Brewerton.
Inside the Preservation Studio are two different types of photo scanners. The first can quickly scan through stacks of loose photos at a rate of 50 per minute. The second is a flatbed scanner that can scan entire pages of mounted photos from albums and then separate them digitally.
Do you have other media you’d like to save besides your old photos? VHS home movies can be scanned and simultaneously burned onto writeable DVDs in real time on a video converter in the atudio, and at an adjacent station slides, slide carousels and various sizes of film negatives can be digitized and the resulting images can be saved to an SD card.
You’re just a few miles away from digitizing your family memories.
The Preservation Studio is open to Onondaga County residents with a valid library card, and residents of neighboring counties who have a NOPL membership. Visitors are encouraged to bring their own digital storage device, but the library does have DVDs, CDs, SD cards and flash drives available for sale at the service desk. Walk-ins are welcome, but appointments are strongly recommended. Call (315) 676-7484 to reserve a time, and staff members will be happy to help you get started.
For more information about the Preservation Studio, FAQs and links to free online photo editing software and classes, please visit nopl.org/pstudio.
