Digitization is a useful and easy way to share your family archive with other members of your family and potentially help preserve audiovisual material or rapidly deteriorating material. You should not, however, use digitization as the sole form of preservation. Digital preservation has its own challenges including the need to maintain equipment or software that can read or open particular file formats and often, the original or analog material can outlast a digital counterpart. For that reason, creating a stable, ideal storage environment for your materials should be your first priority to ensure a lengthy life for your materials.
The SDSU library has book-eye scanners. The book-eye scanners are overhead, allowing the user to easily flip pages. These scanners create PDFs which can be emailed or saved to a flash drive (recommended), and are not connected to computers. There is no charge for scanning at this time. Be sure to adjust settings to appropriate resolution. Click here to find book-eye scanner locations in the library.
Recommended scanners to purchase for personal use:
The SDSU library unfortunately does not have services to digitize anything apart from text and still image. If you have audio visual material that you would like to digitize, consider the options below.
