Scanning News Articles
Microfilm and microfiche to eventually become a thing of the past
Date: 18/06/2008
Microfilm and microfiche are kept by many organisations containing archived material which can date back centuries in some cases; these reels of film were very popular with libraries, archivists, architectures and public sectors in the past 30 years. Now with scanning technology moving forward all the time it has become quite a common process for organisations to convert their countless rolls of microfilm or microfiche cards into an electronic format with the aid of film scanning.
The microfilm reels are either 16mm or 35mm wide reels of negatives which are usually around 100ft in length, it can be difficult to feed these into a reader to find one or two particular documents and they are not always easy to handle and manage while searching through rolls. Microfiches contain many images in a card type format containing around 75 images per card they are a little easier for handling and management but again locating particular documents often involves a painstaking search process going through all the images.
With microfilm and microfiche scanners becoming more affordable it has enabled organisations to scan and convert any films or fiches into a readable, text searchable electronic format which can be stored on a network or on backup CD’s and drives. This makes locating a document much easier by either using a text search or viewing the thumbnails on the computer screen and selecting the document required.
Scanning services are widely available to those who do not have the budget or simply the requirement to buy microfilm/microfiche scanner. The reels and cards are taken in, scanned, converted, indexed and returned in an easy to manage indexed set of electronic files. This process is now becoming popular at a fast rate and it’s easy to see why, as companies prefer to have their information backed up rather than lying in a drawer on films or cards. It is not very often that films are still used to initially store this information but the process still exists. With the new technology and scanning services becoming more and more popular we could soon see the end of microfilm and microfiche storage in big organisations.
Return to Scanning articles
