Using internal laptop optical drive as an external drive?

For starters, I did numerous searches and did not find an answer to my question. My question is - Is it possible to use/turn an internal optical drive from a laptop into an external drive for use with another laptop? I have a dead Inspiron 1526 (cause of death unknown) and I want to use the optical drive from it with my Inspiron N5050 to speed up copying CDs. The CDs are from a radio program my father used to do and I converted them to MP3 files to send to the radio station. He stopped his program after 60 years and family members want copies of his program. As you can probably tell, I'm not a computer whiz by any means, so I thought I'd ask the experts.