Nothing lasts forever, and that includes your old VHS tapes. Even if you still have a VCR to play them, the tape quality can degrade as the years go by.
The solution? Digitize those tapes. And you can do it for free in the Main Library Creative Studio!
That’s why library patron Alex Yu has been logging hours at the Creative Studio’s Media Preservation Station on the library’s third floor (pictured above).
Alex is digitizing the video archives of riksha (pronounced “rickshaw”), a not-for-profit magazine that focuses on arts, literature, and music by Asian Americans in the Midwest.
“Asian American culture in the Midwest tends to get lost,” Alex says, noting that media representation is often biased toward the East and West coasts. “Stories of Asian Americans in the Midwest are underrepresented. It’s nice that we have a unique Asian American story to tell.”
Going from analog to digital
Now an online-only magazine, riksha was distributed nationally in print starting in 1993. The magazine also put on live events in Chicago in the 1990s and 2000s.
And that’s the video footage that Alex is digitizing: stand-up comedy shows, live music, stage readings and one-act plays, art exhibits, and more.
At each session at the Main Library, he pops a VHS tape into the player, puts on headphones, and patiently watches and listens to hours of footage documenting Asian American arts and culture in pre-smartphone Chicago. He saves them to a thumb drive and uploads excerpts to YouTube.
So much of what they were doing was “homegrown,” Alex says. He’s not only preserving these cultural moments, but making them available to a wider audience.
‘Breaking barriers’
There’s comedian Sapna Kumar performing at the Park West around 2001. As an out lesbian in the 1990s doing stand-up before going on to acting roles, “she was breaking barriers in our culture,” Alex says.
There’s late actor Quincy Wong performing a satirical one-man show in 1994: “Secret Asian Man.”
Wong had roles in the movie Mo’ Money and the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, among others. And after his death in 2002, his family established a scholarship in his name at Columbia College Chicago for undergraduates who “demonstrate a genuine commitment to the Asian and Asian-American arts communities.”
Still, Alex says, before these old performances were digitized, “there wasn’t much footage of him on the internet.”
There’s a lot more to see on riksha’s YouTube channel, including Pintig Cultural Group performing excerpts from the classic Filipino immigration novel America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, at the Degrees of Influence Asian American Arts festival at the Beacon Street Gallery in 1993.
View all footage on riksha’s YouTube channel »
Digitize VHS, cassettes, Super 8 film & more
After Alex finishes digitizing riksha’s VHS footage, he’s going to tackle another project in the Creative Studio: home movies shot by his father on Super 8 film!
If you have old media you’d like to digitize, check out our website for more information. Some equipment is do-it-yourself, and some requires staff training before use. You can also schedule Learning Lab appointments for additional help to get started.
