I visit the West Charleston Library several weekends a month, but I rarely borrow books. I leaf through their jazz, rock and hip-hop CDs and grab a few. I pick up the audiobooks and movies I’ve reserved through the Library District’s modest-looking but feature-packed app. (Speaking of apps, I also check out streaming movies, e-books and audiobooks using Hoopla, Kanopy and Libby, all free to use with your library card.) And lately I’ve cast sidelong glances at their video game selection, which is loaded with seventh- and eighth-generation titles I haven’t played.

For the most part, however, I’m all about the Digital Memories Preservation Labs. Located at West Charleston and five other district branches (Enterprise, Rainbow, Mesquite, Laughlin, and soon, Whitney), these labs are a boon to art and science alike. You can walk in with an armload of printed photos, film negatives, cassettes, CDs, DVDs, VHS or even 3.5-inch floppy discs, and leave with a USB flash drive full of digital files ready for editing, posting or storage in the cloud.

True to its name, the Digital Memories Preservation Lab zaps so-called “legacy media” into the digital space, like that big laser in the Tron movies. And as you’d suspect of someone who casually references Tron, I regard it as a kind of speakeasy for audio/visual geeks. I’ll spend entire afternoons in the lab—you can reserve it for up to four hours at a time—scanning old negatives and slides.

The process is both calming and revelatory. I marvel at the colors and details that the drugstore photo processing labs of the late 20th century couldn’t translate into prints, and at the mysteries unearthed from slides that haven’t seen a projector in decades. (A “slide” is a film transparency you can project onto a wall or screen; see Mad Men season 1, episode 13 for further details. I swear I’m not patronizing you: Recently, a twentysomething friend really did ask me what slides are.)

Using the Digital Memories Preservation Lab requires some advance work, detailed at thelibrarydistrict.org/dmpl. Find a empty flash drive—you probably have a half-dozen of them by now—fill out the lab’s release form, book a time window and show up a bit early so staffers can show you the room and make sure whatever media you’re digitizing won’t harm the equipment. Then plug in your drive, consult the guidebook for the equipment you’re using that day (they also take most digital video formats and 8mm film reels, just so you know) and make your once-forgotten things feel new and vital again.

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