In April of 2024, UGA's Walter J. Brown Media Archives held our first "Free the Tapes" community digitization event, where we invited members of the public to drop off up to 5 audiovisual items to be digitized by BMA staff, free of charge, with no donation to the archives required. The program culminated with a Home Movie Day style screening of clips that were digitized as part of Free the Tapes. We will discuss logistics, including working with our UGA Libraries colleagues who specialize in public programming and community outreach, and how we advocated within our organization to get the event approved (including by UGA's legal counsel). We will also discuss how we adapted when we received about 5x as many items as we had anticipated and how we used Airtable to track digitization and manage all patron communication. We will go in depth into "lessons learned," including how we adapted our program for our Fall 2024 Free the Tapes event. Ultimately, our Free the Tapes event was a success, both in terms of public feedback and internally with staff, and this program will be valuable to anyone considering something similar in their community.
