Next in our Throwback Technology series: Microfilm! Same ground rules apply: I'll share some older "technologies" that I've gathered from the library and from my personal items. I will use a broad definition of technology to include anything people invent to help them accomplish a task or purpose. And, I invite you to share your questions and/or memories about these items.So microfilm is really, really tiny film. No, that's not right. OK, it's a really, really small image of something, stuck on a piece of film. Yeah, that's closer. The basic idea is that you can create an image of a page (or typically two pages, side by side) of a magazine, journal, or newspaper. And then you can take that image and shrink it onto a long piece of film. Then, you can repeat the process until you have hundreds of pages captured on the same piece of film. The standard length of the film is 100 feet. Now, you could just loop the film around your arm (many times) and go carrying it around and try to convince people to hold it up to the sun and squint and be amazed that you're carrying two weeks of the New York Times with you (it's so light!). But, after you get over your initial excitement, you should sit down and think about the practicalities involved.
So, microfilm came about to make it easier to store more information in a smaller space. By shrinking roughly 700 pages of a periodical onto a reel of microfilm, you end up with a little box that is less than 4" x 4" x 1 2/3". You can put a lot of those boxes in the same space it would take to hold the equivalent stacks of newspapers.
Now, the cost of saving all the space was that you had to have something to view those tiny pages with (holding them up to the sun and squinting is not recommended, and not at all effective even for people with perfect vision). With a microfilm reader/printer, you could make the small images large again on a screen, as you ran the loop of film between two reels and underneath a magnifying lens. You could even print individual pages or sections of pages to take them with you. Another cost, though, was that in the race to photograph all of those pages, sometimes pages were left out (accidentally, or in the case of advertisements, on purpose -- who needs those, some people thought). And many color images were captured in black and white, because it was cheaper than color microfilm. That made some microfilm incomplete, or left historians without interesting information that had been in the original periodical.
Of course, you have to imagine the introduction of microfilm taking place before we had computers and scanning and the production of periodicals in digital formats from the beginning. If we were designing things now, we'd just find ways to save our digital articles, etc. online, and share them around. That is how most articles are experienced these days. But in the microfilm days, it was a great way to keep more information available when the alternative was keeping issue after issue after issue of journals and newspapers, all stacked on shelves, and prone to getting out of order.
What is a little crazy is the transitions that libraries have had to make, from print periodicals, to microfilm (along with recent print periodicals), and then eventually to full text articles and journals online. But, at each step people thought they were doing the right thing to preserve the past. The most controversial step was the argument to remove print and replace it with microfilm because the microfilm would last longer. That might be true (estimates now say microfilm will last 500 years), but paper lasts pretty long (maybe hundreds of years in the right conditions), and the loss of quality or content during the microfilming process was frustrating. Our rush to digitize may have lost some elements of print periodicals, too, and the magnetic media that computer memory is stored on may last only about 10 years (so all of the servers we stick stuff on are being constantly updated and replaced so we don't lose stuff).
In the end, we need to think about what is involved in using a particular manner of storing information (paper: your hands and eyes, microfilm: a reader/printer, digital: your phone or laptop). And we need to think about longevity. Microfilm was one approach that made some sense at the time, and is still around, though much reduced in use (we just have some sample reels left over from our collection, and no reader/printer). If you'd like to see what a reel of microfilm looks like, stop by the library and take a look. More throwback technology is coming at you next week!
