Should You Digitize Home Movies?

Many of us have them, lurking somewhere in the house. A shoe box full of 8mm film reels. One of those fake-wood-paneled cassette cases full of VHS tapes. Footage of childhood birthday parties, summer vacations, playing in the snow, goofy hairdos. They sit around because we do not have the means--or, let's be honest, the inclination--to watch them, but we also feel like throwing them away is somehow a repudiation of our past. Like a high school yearbook, they inspire us to ask "Why is that still here," but also taunt us with the idea that we cannot get rid of them.

Fortunately, we have a choice these days. We can digitize those old home movies, and then we'll have them in a way we can view, and forever! (Well, not really forever; the average shelf life of a DVD seems to be somewhere around 10 years, just like a VHS cassette. But far, far less than a film reel. Though making a raw video file and storing it in several locations would offer greater security, sort of.) A range of products and services exist to transfer those films and tapes to digital formats, to suit differing budgets and needs. You don't need to write a grant to have high-quality digital restoration done by professionals for your 16th birthday tape; but a VCR-DVD combo machine could do it quite cheaply, and suitably for personal use. So the question is: Should you digitize them?

From an archives perspective, this is a question of how valuable the record (the birthday tape, let's say) might be. Archives describe many different types of value, but the key ideas for a home movie are "intrinsic value," "informational value," and "evidential value." Each of these indicates why an archive might take an object, and how they might deal with its "digitization." (And, spoiler alert, why I think you might or might not want to keep the home movies.)

1. Intrinsic value is the value of the object itself, based on its physical characteristics. Often this comes across for handmade, crafty items like scrapbooks. Of the three, this is the least likely to apply to your birthday tape. Which is good, because it's also the hardest to fairly reproduce in a digital form.
2. Informational value is the value of the information the object contains. I would make the claim that the overwhelming majority of items archives keep are considered to have substantial informational value. The tricky thing about informational value in the world of film, videos, and photos is that it is not always the same as the value the creator saw when making the object. For example, your mom probably recorded your 16th birthday because she thought it would be kind of neat to watch later and remember your special day. But let's suppose this tape went to an archive. The archive probably is not interested in remembering your special day (no offense to you!), but maybe the tape has informational value because of how the people in it are dressed, or how your family celebrated your birthday. Maybe an enterprising archivist sees in your birthday tape useful information about American teenagers in the 80s-90s, outside of the more common fictional or staged representations of teens. In other words, your tape might have all kinds of informational value, to the right person. And, of course, the information on your tape is the easiest thing to reproduce digitally.
3. Evidential value is the value of the object as evidence of a human activity. In this case, the birthday tape is evidence of home video recording. This kind of straddles the physical object (how the tape was labeled has evidential value) and its content (how your mom handled shot composition, even if she does not know what "shot composition" is). An archive with an interest in collecting amateur film and video recordings is likely to see evidential value in your tape. Digital reproduction, therefore, can preserve some evidential value, but not all. To use a paper analogy, you can scan an author's notebook and recreate most of the evidence of how he composed a story, but you will probably lose some details about how he handled the notebook, whether he paper-clipped newspaper stories to pages, and so on.

With these three types of value, you can make an informed decision about whether (and how) to digitize your home movies. In fact, you can assess why you should keep them at all. So here are the three questions to ask:

1.  Is this birthday tape valuable to me because the tape itself looks cool? (Remember, if the only cool thing about the tape is the drawing your mom made on the label, you can just scan that and be done with it.)
2. Is this birthday tape valuable to me because I want to watch it and remember how exactly my birthday happened? Alternately, is it valuable to me because in the ensuing years I have become an armchair cultural anthropologist and now I find myself saying things like, "The sartorial habits of the late-20th century American adolescent are quite illuminating"?
3. Is this tape valuable to me because I love making home movies and want to use it to see how home movies used to be made?

How did you answer these questions? If you said yes to any of them, you now have articulated why the birthday tape is valuable. Accordingly, you know what to do with the tape. If the tape as a physical object is valuable, keep it. (And probably buy a display case for it.) If the information on the tape is valuable, transfer it to a DVD. But if none of these values really jump out at you, you really don't need to either digitize or keep the tape, and you can let it go with a clean conscience.

But, as a professional courtesy to me: If you are going to throw away that tape, consider contacting a local historical society or archive and offering the tape. They might not want it, they might tell you about someone else who would. You can give them complete ownership of both the tape and its content and it might be really useful to others.

Of course, if on your 16th birthday you had a really crazy hairdo, maybe you don't want to risk becoming a research tool for others.