The BBC and the British Museum have an interactive object search tool online. You can browse by location, theme, culture, size, colour, material, and the timeline. You can also add your own objects to the catalog.

Click on the image below to check it out:

Microform describes films or paper that contain microreproductions. The images are usually reduced at least 25 times their original size.

Microfiche is essentially a photographic negative (or positive) containing many ‘pages’ of information. The information has been scaled down, so the pages of a magazine can fit on something about the size of a postcard.

Microfilm also contains many small pages of information, but the content is contained on a spool, like a roll of film:

The advantage of microform media is that a lot of information can be contained in a much smaller space.

During world war II, the U.S. came up with a system to deliver mail to soldiers overseas, called V-Mail. Letters were written on special V-Mail letterheads, before being photographed and converted to microfilm. Converting the letters to microfilm meant they could ship much less mail - instead of shipping 2000lbs of paper mail, they were shipping 40 lbs of microfilm. After making it across the ocean, the letters were reprinted on photographic paper (still not full scale) and delivered to the soldier.

V-Mail also countered espionage by eliminating the possibility of sending letters with microdots or invisible ink.

A microdot is about the size of a full stop ( . ) but contains information that can be read with a 50x microscope. The photographic technique to produce such small images was developed in the late 1800s, as a way of sending military correspondence by carrier pigeon.

Today microdots are used to mark property, so items can be identified in case of theft. Microdots can be attached with an adhesive, and sometimes the adhesive will fluoresce under UV light so the microdots can be located and the information can be retrieved.

This reminds me of the novelty of the your-name-on-a-grain-of-rice things. Something more interesting though, is pet-microchipping, which is what the piece of electronics on the right of the next image does:

Before I start thinking about electronic tags, I want to think more about the analog nature of microfilm.

This is the first microfilm reader I’ve used in a long time. I can remember my mom using microfilm in the library, and I remember playing with the machine without any real intent, and that’s what I did again last week in the historical documents room of the SF Main library.

The roll of microfilm that I looked at was created in 1975. It was Volume 1-A ‘Blotter of Official Notes’ of the 1846 San Francisco County records. Now it is 2010. The microfilm is 35 years old.

This machine was a canon microprinter 90. It costs about $3000 and weighs 75lbs.

How To Load Microfilm:

New York Times 1851

New York Times 2010

 

Sometimes we store stuff in a box and don’t open it again for a few years.

Yesterday I had a sandwich and I got this cardboard container (4 hours passed before I opened the box to eat the rest of the sandwich). Jacob’s iphone was nearby and it can function as a timer.

So I put the phone inside, started the timer, and closed the box.

At least one interesting thing happened.

We started to leave the house and jacob couldn’t find his phone because it was still in the box. He opened the box and saw that 10 minutes had passed, but to his surprise the box also contained 1 new sms from his friend.

Another thing I noticed is that the screen on the iphone has a backlight so I could see light coming through the edges of the container, and knew the phone was still inside without having to open the box.

…………………..

We have found ancient clay pots containing codices, buried deep in caves, that haven’t been seen by humans for over 2000 years. (example: dead sea scrolls)

(MESSAGE STORED) … but the memory of message dies out as 2000 YEARS PASS. then (MESSAGE FOUND) accidentally. If message hasn’t decayed, then it will need to be deciphered, because language has changed so drastically.

We know the approximate age of the very old things because radioactive isotopes decay and we can calculate backwards based on their half lives.

………………….

1. This prototype is flawed, because jacob needs his telephone, so he opens the box sooner than if it contained, for example, his great grandpa’s broken stopwatch.

2. It is severely limited by the battery life on the timer, which is probably only a day or two on this device.

3. Finally, it is imprecise, because the timer starts counting before the lid of the box is completely closed.

The Internet Archive is located at 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118

Visiting the physical location of an online library isn’t that interesting, but I wanted to check out the internet archive anyway. The archive has been in the building of an old church for about nine months (since november 2009).

Here is a photo of a poster with an image of the san francisco datacenter. They have mirrors in amsterdam and alexandria, egypt.

The reading room is attached to the side of the church, and this is where the books and microfilm are being digitized. They operate 5 days a week with a night shift, digitizing about 1000 books per day.

None of the books that are donated to be digitized are destroyed. Right now they are kept in storage somewhere, and there are very many boxes with very many books.

And very many boxes filled with boxes of microfilm.

The row of computers in the middle are being used to digitize microfilm, and the black booths on the walls are photographing books and compiling pdfs and stuff to be uploaded to archive.org

There were a few handouts about the aim of the internet archive and also about how to digitize your own collections.

Here are some materials and as I have time, I will try to write the approximate age and type of the material and what conditions it has been exposed to. The point of this is to see how materials change over time, with the idea that maybe the appearance of a material can tell something about it’s age.

wood

copper siding on building,

wood

copper

wood

painted steel

steel

concrete

photograph

newspaper

wood

copper