Scanning News Articles
Microfilm and microfiche in the public sector
Date: 09/07/2008
Public sector organisations such as local councils, schools libraries and archives currently hold a large amount of important historical data on microfilm and microfiche; this could be risky business considering how time has moved forward.
These formats were popular in recent decades for storing documents on films and film cards which could be easily kept stored away, as long as the data was backed up it mattered little about how many times and how convenient it was to retrieve this data.
Microfilm is stored on a 16mm or 35mm reel which is convenient for storage due to the small size. However reading the information requires feeding into a microfilm reader which isn’t always a walk in the park, then having to flick through each image to find one document can be even more time consuming. The same applies to microfiche which would have over 30 images stored on one card like a page of photograph negatives.
These methods have been phased out by electronic scanning over the years but still there are a lot of government local organisations still holding hundreds of thousand of files on microfilm and microfiche. The likelihood is that they will be the only backed up copies of these files. When it comes to holding records on benefits and financial accounts that can cover a decade it is important that these records are kept safe in multiple places. One disaster or misplacement could result in thousands of files being lost forever.
Microfilm and microfiche are now being recognised as less reliable than the idea originally promised which stems from the influx of electronic scanning. The majority of companies now are having microfilm and microfiche files scanned into electronic format which is returned to them on disks, these can be copied numerous times, left in different locations and read easily by any staff at a computer. So it is alarming how many public sector organisations still rely on microfilm and microfiche as a major source of backup for historical, personal and private documents. When microfilm and microfiche can be scanned electronically and kept on disk or on a hard drive it makes sense to get those reels and cards out and ensure the documents are converted into the format of today.
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