Richmond’s Main Library is home to the city’s branch of the Memory Lab, a series of spaces that have sprung up across the country as a way to give physical materials of personal and public significance new life as digital, accessible records.

Since 2019, the lab has been contributing to the library’s repository of central Virginia history. But a cash infusion of $900,000, by way of a newly awarded Mellon Grant, will go a long way toward furthering its efforts to bolster Virginia’s public memory archives.

At present, the Memory Lab is a secluded room on the library’s main floor filled with recording equipment, scanners and audio devices. People can book a time slot on the library’s website to come in to record oral histories of their families or neighborhoods, digitize photographs, transform VHS tapes into digital videos or transfer their music from cassettes and CDs to cloud storage (don’t forget to bring a USB or digital storage device), all for free. There’s room for one person to work on a project at a time, and the library offers technical assistance to those attempting to preserve their mementos and memories.

In the near future, the Memory Lab will offer even more.

“Our goal is to lead classes, workshops and programs on how to digitize physical materials and to encourage folks who have materials relating to Richmond’s history to consider donating to our collection,” said Chloe McCormick, Main Library’s senior special collections librarian. “For example, someone may have childhood photos of the neighborhood they grew up in, which has changed a lot over the years. We want to see those photos, and other people want to see those photos.” 

McCormick, who is also a trained folklorist, just completed a one-year role as a Memory Lab fellow. Much of her work during the past year involved staffing the Memory Lab and assisting people who used it, reorganizing the local history collections, overseeing oral history projects and helping prepare the library for its centennial anniversary, which it celebrated from November 2022 through November 2023. 

The library, said McCormick, helps to fill a niche in a city that values its history and is largely defined by it.

“I think in Richmond, we’re so lucky to have so many large-scale historical institutions at our disposal. And that’s amazing, but I think what we excel at in the library is helping people who walk in off the street looking for that grassroots social history of Richmond or other underrepresented history that’s not always easily accessible at other institutions,” she said. 

As an example, McCormick cites a sustained interest in Richmond’s Black history, evidenced by African American residents dropping in frequently to seek information about their genealogical and family records. Finding such information is a unique challenge Black Americans face, often due to the country’s legacy of slavery.

“In 1860, nearly 4 million enslaved individuals lived in the United States but they didn’t appear on federal census records,” wrote Ahmed Johnson, a reference librarian in the Library of Congress Researcher and Reference Services Department. “Therefore, you have to search for other records to help you locate family names and push your family history back further.” 

McCormick and the Richmond Main Library staff can help uncover such records.

“On an almost daily basis, I’m helping Black patrons find something about their community or family history,” McCormick said. “We do run into those walls all the time, where there isn’t easily accessible information about the topic they’re looking for, or the trail of their family members goes cold.” 

The Memory Lab can bring these histories, which have perhaps only prevailed previously as family lore, into public view. 

“This stuff exists in living memory, so our goal is to access that and make it more widely available,” McCormick said. 

The Main Library — which already engages with several Black heritage groups including the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society — is hoping to work with more historic Black churches in Richmond and throughout the state to tap into their member records and archives. Perhaps in this way, descendants may find their ancestors, and the public record of local Black history be made richer.

The grant, the largest in the library’s history, will also enable the library to create personal archiving kits, offering the tools and opportunity to capture precious memories to those who can’t come to the library. 

“The kits could contain cameras, audio recording equipment, lights, scanners and other devices,” McCormick said. “So if you have family members who can’t make it to the library and you want to record them sharing an oral history, or if you have materials that you can’t bring here, you can use these tools in your own homes and communities.”

Richmond’s revamped Memory Lab is expected to be complete by the end of 2024. That gives you plenty of time to think of what knowledge you’d like to preserve representing your life, family, heritage or community, and to decide if other Virginians can share in that knowledge too.