From The Atlantic:
I recently acquired a decommissioned microfilm reader. My university bought the reader for $16,000 in 1998, but its value has depreciated to $0 in their official bookkeeping records. Machines like it played a central role in both research and secret-agent tasks of the last century. But this one had become an embarrassment.
The bureaucrats wouldn’t let me store the reader in a laboratory that also houses a multimillion-dollar information-display system. They made me promise to “make sure no VIPs ever see it there.” After lots of paperwork and negotiation, I finally had to transport the machine myself. Unlike a computer—even an old one—it was heavy and ungainly. It would not fit into a car, and it could not be carried by two people for more than a few feet. Even moving the thing was an embarrassment. No one wanted it, but no one wanted me to have it around either.
And yet the microfilm machine is still widely used. It has centuries of lasting power ahead of it, and new models are still being manufactured. It’s a shame that no intrigue will greet their arrival, because these machines continue to prove essential for preserving and accessing archival materials.
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The first micrographic experiments, in 1839, reduced a daguerreotype image down by a factor of 160. By 1853, the format was already being assessed for newspaper archives. The processes continued to be refined during the 19th century. Even so, microfilm was still considered a novelty when it was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia of 1876.
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But the apparatus that gained traction was G. L. McCarthy’s 35mm scanning camera, which Eastman Kodak introduced as the Rekordak in 1935, specifically to preserve newspapers. By 1938, universities began using it to microfilm dissertations and other research papers. During World War II, microphotography became a tool for espionage, and for carrying military mail, and soon there was a recognition that massive archives of information and cross-referencing gave agencies an advantage. Libraries adopted microfilm by 1940, after realizing that they could not physically house an increasing volume of publications, including newspapers, periodicals, and government documents. As the war concluded in Europe, a coordinated effort by the U.S. Library of Congress and the U.S. State Department also put many international newspapers on microfilm as a way to better understand quickly changing geopolitical situations. Collecting and cataloging massive amounts of information, in microscopic form, from all over the world in one centralized location led to the idea of a centralized intelligence agency in 1947.
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By 1943, 400,000 pages had been transferred to microfilm by the U.S. National Archives alone, and the originals were destroyed. Millions more were reproduced and destroyed worldwide in an effort to protect the content from the ravages of war. In the 1960s, the U.S. government offered microfilm documents, especially newspapers and periodicals, for sale to libraries and researchers; by the end of the decade, copies of nearly 100,000 rolls (with about 700 pages on each roll) were available.
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Their longevity was another matter. As early as May 17, 1964, as reported in The New York Times, microfilm appeared to degrade, with “microfilm rashes” consisting of “small spots tinged with red, orange or yellow” appearing on the surface. An anonymous executive in the microfilm market was quoted as saying they had “found no trace of measles in our film but saw it in the film of others and they reported the same thing about us.” The acetate in the film stock was decaying after decades of use and improper storage, and the decay also created a vinegar smell—librarians and researchers sometimes joked about salad being made in the periodical rooms. The problem was solved by the early 1990s, when Kodak introduced polyester-based microfilm, which promised to resist decay for at least 500 years.
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Microfilm’s decline intensified with the development of optical-character-recognition (OCR) technology. Initially used to search microfilm in the 1930s, Emanuel Goldberg designed a system that could read characters on film and translate them into telegraph code. At MIT, a team led by Vannevar Bush designed a microfilm rapid selector capable of finding information rapidly on microfilm. Ray Kurzweil further improved OCR, and by the end of the 1970s, he had created a computer program, later bought by Xerox, that was adopted by LexisNexis, which sells software for electronically storing and searching legal documents.
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Microfilm machines trained people’s eyes to read differently: A blur of rapidly advancing images replaced flipping through pages, a precursor to the transition from reading books to surfing the web. Once we adjusted to the nonlinear reading devices, we wanted to jump around instead of advance through page after page. When Adobe introduced the portable document format (PDF) in the late 1990s, allowing facsimile-like scans to be available in electronic and, later, in searchable OCR forms, microfilm fell further out of favor as a storage and retrieval system.
Today’s digital searches allow a reader to jump directly to a desired page and story, eliminating one downside of microfilm. But there’s a trade-off: Digital documents usually omit the context. The surrounding pages in the morning paper or the rest of the issue of a magazine or journal vanish when a single, specific article can be retrieved directly. That context includes more than a happenstance encounter with an abutting news story. It also includes advertisements, the position and size of one story in relation to others, and even the overall design of the page at the time of its publication. A digital search might retrieve what you are looking for (it also might not!), but it can obscure the historical context of that material.
Digital searches also turn search activity into data that someone else can surveil, compare, quantify, and visualize. The user’s own thinking becomes the object of search and retrieval, not just the documents that user hopes to find. None of this happens when using a microfilm machine. A library can record what materials a user requests or checks out, but the microfilm reader itself cannot track what someone looks at when using the machine. It is not networked to all other searches. No entity, corporate or governmental, uses algorithms to analyze microfilm readers’ habits and predilections. The microfilm reader does not read you, your emotions, or your political or consumerist desires.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
I have several copies of my military records on microfiche.
Have not needed to look at the records for many years and have no plans to do so.
I still use microfilm in my research in early baseball history. Truthfully, by “use microfilm” I mean scan the relevant pages onto a flash drive. Actually reading it comes later, at home. Furthermore, this is much better. Ten years ago, microfilm research was a giant exercise in triage. Taking notes took time. Printing pages cost money, and while the cost was trivial if the number of pages was small, it added up fast. Nowadays I have about thirty-five years of newspaper coverage that I can carry in my pocket.
Ah yes, a good flashback to the first job in my current state career: helping microfilm old newspapers. Even though our state library is moving towards digitizing, they have tens of thousands of microfilm for the largest dailies as well as the smallest dailies, bi-weeklies, tri-weeklies, bi-monthlies (etc. etc. etc.). These things are a gold mine for researchers of all shapes and sizes.
Ah, and that in turn gives me a flashback to one of my earliest jobs: figuring out how to read old digital field tapes full of geophysical data, and convert them into industry standard formats. The tapes were rarely labelled and never followed any standard, since they were recorded in the late 1960s when no such standards existed yet.
Sometimes it was a guessing game just to tell how many bytes per inch they were recorded at so that they could be read at all. (I learned how to dip the free end of the tape in iron filings and tell the data density by the pattern of striations that appeared.) Once the tape was read, the next task was to do a hexadecimal dump of the first few tens of kilobytes of data, to see if there was anything human-readable in there that might function as a header and give a clue to the identity of the contents. Sometimes there was a microfilmed field log cross-indexed to the reel number on the tape, sometimes not, and sometimes there was but it contained nothing helpful. I spent a lot of time poring over the hard copies of those data dumps.
Then I got fired, because I would not agree to work for the princely sum of five dollars an hour, and the job was given to the wife of the sales manager, who couldn’t do it. I believe my employer lost the entire contract shortly thereafter.
Moral of a too-long story: It isn’t just analog stuff that becomes worthless if you lose the index.
Microfilm is pretty worthless when the index or catalog has been lost.
BTDT at a major university library.
That’s true for more than just microfilm.
At the end of WW2, the British captured the archive of the records of the Luftstreitkräfte, the German air force of WW1. (I may be mistaken. They may be the records of the air detachment of the Kriegsmarine.) So what did the British Army do with these records? They ordered a squad of soldiers to box them up and ship them to London. And be damned quick about it. That’s what they did, and the index was lost.
After the advent of the photocopier, the US National Archives said, “Hey! We would like to have copies of all those.” The British generously (I mean that) said, “Sure. You got a week to copy all.”
The copies lay in boxes for 30 years. In 2012, one retired librarian from the National Archive began the task of digitizing and cataloging the records. He is still working at it with no end in sight. (If he were transcribing the records from the old German script, the task would be Sisyphean.)
On a related note, the French promise to complete the digitization of their WW1 records this year and make them available online. I do not believe they will make their scheduled completion date, but I can tell you from the records I have seen that the penmanship of the French clerks is quite beautiful. The records are not just easy to read but a pleasure to read.