CPC Media Library
TLDR; If you come to the monthly meeting, you can get access to some sweet paragliding videos to help with your flying 🙂
Background
Over the years, the club has been collecting a large number of paragliding and hang gliding videos. Since the bulk of these videos were collected many years ago, the large majority of them are recorded on VHS tapes.
In recent years, technology has been moving even further away from physical media. It’s becoming more rare to find a disc drive in a new laptop and more people are getting their music and video from services like YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and others.
You can even see public libraries responding to this trend. The Multnomah County Library for the past couple years has provided digital access to part of their library, making it electronically available to members.
Inspired and influenced by this – and with the President’s approval – the club’s VHS tapes and DVDs have been similarly digitized.
There are a lot of benefits to doing this, but it was mainly motivated by wanting to share these with more people in the club. In addition, this will help the club avoid losing videos (since we’ll always have a digital backup), members won’t have to remember to return them, and better accessibility (no need to own a VHS player, videos can be watched from any device connected to the Internet: phone, tablet, computer, tv, etc).
Of course, if you’d rather watch the original VHS (or in some cases, DVD) you can reach out to the club officers before the meeting and we’ll bring the original media.
The Process
To keep with the spirit of a traditional lending process, we will continue to ‘lend’ out the videos but now as web links to the videos, which will expire in a certain amount of time (the day of the next CPC meeting, though this might change).
To check out a video, simply attend one of the monthly CPC meetings and give us your email + video requests. We’ll email you a link and it will automatically expire on the next CPC meeting date (or in about a month).
We hope this will improve accessibility and encourage more to take advantage of the library! If you have any videos you’d like to donate, we’d be happy to add them to the list.
Speaking of the list, here’s a link to our current catalog. Everyone should have the ability to comment so if you have reviews or links to descriptions about the video, feel free to share!