When was microfilm invented

However, there is a process by which you can convert digital images into microfilm: this is called archive writing. The original material can be anything you want preserved on microfilm: newsprint, official record books, medical records, criminal reports, etc. After photographing the material, the microfilm is processed in chemical tanks and then cut into individual rolls.

After creating rolls, the microfilm is packaged in individual containers and labelled for later use. If stored properly, microfilm has a year lifespan.

This makes it great for long-term preservation and minimal storage. That lasts forever. Like microfilm, digital images and data have to be preserved: if you have your files on a USB drive and the drive dies, those images are gone forever.

Or if you delete a file by mistake, gone. Second, microfilm is made to be eye-readable. You can actually just grab a magnifying glass or loupe, pop open the roll of film, and off you go. What happens if they go out of business? What happens to your files? Microfilm is a physical method of ensuring your content and data last for centuries to come, without the need for special machines or applications to view the content.

Kodak knows microfilm, so following their guidance can help you preserve your film records for years to come. Image source. Another method of creating microfilm is through archive writing, which is taking already-digital images and turning them into microfilm.

In many cases, organizations that create microfilm from their records are required through regulation or statute to keep an eye-readable copy of their data. An example: a county recorder has boxes of files and books of official records.

They want the material scanned into digital so they can import it to their records management application, but their state requires an eye-readable copy of the data be kept, as well. Instead of digitizing the records and keeping the hard copy boxes and books is a lot of material and takes up plenty of space , the county decides to shred their paper copies and instead create microfilm as the hard copy backup.

A content medium created in the first half of the s is still used for records preservation?? To be redundant, microfilm is a great long-term storage method for records preservation. One of the first practical uses for microforms occurred during the fall and winter of —71, when Paris was surrounded by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War.

The French used carrier pigeons to fly microfilmed messages hidden in the hollow of a quill across German lines into the capital city. In the s, a New York banker named George McCarthy developed the first practical commercial use of microfilm. In , he was issued a patent for his Checkograph machine, which was designed to make permanent film copies of all banking records. After the 35mm microfilm camera was perfected, Recordak expanded its services in , filming and publishing the New York Times on microfilm.

Two important events in helped to expedite the use of microforms for preservation in libraries. Because newspapers were deteriorating so rapidly and because storing quantities of newspaper presented practical use challenges, Harvard University Library began its Foreign Newspaper Project. World War II provided many opportunities for the use of microphotography for military mail and espionage. An example was the Victory Mail V-Mail system.

US soldiers and sailors stationed overseas and their loved ones at home wrote letters on special forms that were microphotographed and airlifted as microfilm, which saved weight and space aboard military transport aircraft. In the s, the unprecedented immediacy of war and its potential threats to the US homeland populace, community, and national well-being raised a keen new awareness of the value of library and archival materials as cultural resources.

The security and preservation of these assets became an official defense objective. The expansion of more refined methods in intelligence gathering led to truly extraordinary actions by individual librarians, curators, soldiers, and ordinary citizens that positively impacted the movement towards preservation of cultural material. A number of countries started agencies engaged in similar preservation and conservation initiatives in the postwar period.

Many enlightened and concerned people came to see the destruction of books as a crime against humanity, and their preservation actions inspired a new level of communication and commitment among key figures in the worlds of culture, scholarship, and politics.

During the Cold War years, the condensed microform continued to be further developed and widely used for espionage and secret service. The idea of using microforms for both active information systems and for the preservation of materials found many new supporters. Increased funding and improved technologies encouraged academic and research libraries to continue expanding their applications of this format.

Increased in-house microfilming and processing for the government ensued, as did the sales of micrographic equipment. Development of new standards, the passage of a new copyright law, and the appearance of cheaper, higher-quality film types in the s contributed to continued integration of microforms into library collections.

The information explosion that libraries faced in the s allowed microforms to lead the way as an alternative medium, addressing and ameliorating the problem of rapidly decreasing shelf space, as well as avoiding the burgeoning expense of print materials and journal binding.

Micropublishers, large and small, provided monographic sets, documents, journals, and other materials on a single-purchase or a standing-order basis.

Improvements in microform reading equipment also helped to make this desirable money saving option a more realistic application. Microforms gained further acceptance by the ever-growing needs of the legal, medical, and business records professions. Computer output microforms were used to create insurance and hospital records, college catalogs, patent records, census records, publisher catalogs, library catalogs, and many types of business records.

In the s and s the National Endowment for the Humanities NEH funded two major initiatives: the Brittle Books program, intended to secure a future for nineteenth- and twentieth-century material printed on poor-quality acidic papers, and the United States Newspaper Project USNP , a cooperative effort to catalog and microfilm newspapers from municipalities in every US state and territory.

Many service bureaus and preservation microfilming operations augmented in-house facilities established mainly in the s to accommodate new and larger library markets. At this same time, the standards and guidelines published by the American National Standards Institute ANSI , International Organization for Standardizations ISO and Association for Information and Image Management AIIM were revised and vetted by the industry—as well as by library and archival community—to strengthen and clarify the specifications for the high quality and longevity of preservation microfilm.

In addition, to ensure greater accessibility of all microforms, bibliographic control was addressed and advanced. A shift in acquisitions began towards the end of the s, however, from microforms to electronic formats.

This period saw the rise of online databases and indexes, the increased development and accessibility of full-text journals, the digitization of dissertations and theses, and the emergence of e-books.

Libraries began eliminating their standing orders for journals in microform, and in some cases, newspapers on microfilm. As the number of libraries purchasing microforms declined, the micropublishing costs rose. By the turn of the twenty-first century, microfilm journals were not as much of a cost savings over bound print as they had once been. Yet even in the digital age microforms continue to serve an important role, particularly for archiving purposes.

Over the past decade, I have redesigned the readies for 21st-century reading devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers. By , , pages had been transferred to microfilm by the U. 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 s, the U. Their longevity was another matter.

The problem was solved by the early s, when Kodak introduced polyester-based microfilm, which promised to resist decay for at least years. This storage system placed more than pages on one four-by-six-inch sheet of film in a grid pattern.

Because microfiche was introduced much later than microfilm, it played a reduced role in newspaper preservation and government archives; it was more widely used in emerging computer data-storage systems. Eventually, electronic archives replaced microfiche almost entirely, while its cousin microfilm remained separate. Initially used to search microfilm in the s, 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 s, 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.

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 s, 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. 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!