“First and foremost, it truly is a write-once technology. When data is recorded, it’s instantly write protected. You can physically destroy the data outright, but you can never alter it.” -sandisk website (i always thought it was SCAN disk until just now)

card is used in a digital camera to take crime scene photos, etc.
the card can’t be edited - a one time use kind of thing
longevity of the card is ~100 years

and it gets put in the evidence folder for the district attorney to see:

at 2:02, the kid in the green shirt will demonstrate SOMETHING AMAZING, and he’s genuinely thrilled

400x usb microscope (basically a webcam) , veho discovery, takes jpgs in many sizes and avi. 1.3megapixel camera, not that great but still fun, software is easy except you need osx10.5.whatever

then i started pointing the microscope at the computer screen.

original newspaper > photographed for microfiche > digital photo of fiche > microscope photo of computer screen displaying .jpg > your computer screen now

a long time ago, many many months, i found a bag of 35mm slides in the dumpster. i regret not taking more than 6, because there were probably 200 at least, and they were amazing. i think they were from the 1960s or 1970s, in metal frames.

the point is that if you think about doing something, you should do it. don’t hesitate or you’ll regret even the smallest things.

those slides are probably gone forever, in some landfill, completely crushed and broken. or maybe they’ll survive and some day someone will find them again, hold them up to the sunlight, and see what a precious treasure even a single photograph can be.

35mm slide of a giraffe at the zoo being backlit by computer screen. ‘640*480′ is text on the screen.

the microscope camera doesn’t have exposure settings, so i tried different background tones, white, light grey, dark grey

photos from digital camera for comparison:

35mm slides, backlit by screen, taken with microscope:

same idea, except with a magnifying lens:

i wanted to take photos of the slides being backlit by something else and i couldn’t find any other light source nearby except this candle

the result is quite warm and nice and without pixels (!)

photo taken of the setup with digital camera:

that’s the microscope, you can see the 35mm slides on the corner of the screen. in the center of the screen is a live view from the microscope.

video from the microscope, slide backlit by the candle, candle being blown out.

visited the sealand archive

Landsarkivet for Sjælland, Lolland-Falster, and Bornholm
Jagtvej 10
Postboks 661
2200 København N.
Denmark

blue albums : Folketællinger , Hele landet, 1787 - 1890 (undtagen 1870)

MICROFICHE !!! for the first time

fiche means ‘page’ in french. there are so many, the main downside over microfilm is that they are easy to misfile. but having pages is one way to distinguish between contents. and a few fiche take up very little room compared to 1 roll of microfilm.

back to the fiche machine, taking too long to find the power switch

the orientation of the fiche is important otherwise it will be upside down or backwards. it is pressed between two glass pieces as you slide the drawer into the machine

then it’s visible on the screen and there is a focus wheel in the center. this machine has 2 views, ‘full page’ and ‘up close’. i made those names up.

full page view:

up close view:

and at some point you realize what you’re seeing is actually the inverse of the original material.

i forgot to take a picture of the shelf with microfilm, but all of them were in brown cardboard boxes in rows and the labeling wasn’t always obvious. i chose something from the ‘diverse’ row.

when storing microfilm for longevity, it’s important to consider these things:

container should be air tight, oxygen free. avoid sunlight and use acid free paper and lignin free cardboard. 21C (70F) ideal temperature, relative humidity between 20 and 30%

here is the microfilm reader. this is an older one and the mechanics were pretty simple, so it was interesting to see it compared to the new machines i’ve seen.

the microfilm from the shelf goes on the left side, centered on that peg. the tap runs down and to the right, under the roller and through the window in the middle of the black section, and back under the second roller and it clips into the ‘take up spool’ on the right.

then you push the reverse buttons, which is counter intuitive so maybe i set it up wrong, but the film will eventually go. you have 2 speeds, very slow and fast.

the film is loaded. this machine has 2 zoom levels, ‘full page’ and ‘up close’. you engage either zoom by sliding the lens piece horizontally. to rotate the image you turn a wheel, and the piece with the mirror rotates - that was kind of amazing. and there’s a scan dial to move the image, and a focus.

FRESNEL LENS!!!!!! out of focus

in focus;

old records from bornholm, 1842

this microfiche was purple

with just our eyes we can see that something is here, and then it’s a puzzle to figure out what it is.

information about the production of the fiche. made in 1993. 1:25 reduction.

12 pt Times - a e g m 1 6 8 9 % Zenith X-Ray Voice Football Jolly Mark Quantum

I know these books exist in a safe place somewhere, and I think a lot of the essence of the book has to be distilled in the conversion from ink on paper to film. but this medium is still beautiful, and they won’t let me read the books because if everyone got to read the books they would fall apart prematurely. The conversion from ink on paper to digital is also a distillation process, sometimes going even further, replacing handwritten material with computer text.

this book, i think, is the way you locate an album on the shelf, because the numbering scheme isn’t self evident.

luddite - noun - someone who is opposed to embracing contemporary technologies

my history of technology professor wrote our exams on a typewriter, and always with star wars jokes.

around 1810 the luddites destroyed some mechanized looms because they felt like they were being replaced by machines. i don’t think my professor was opposed to the industrial revolution, but he kept a comfortable distance from technology, so maybe he’s like a junior rookie luddite. the amish aren’t really luddites either, kevin kelly has an informative article about their use of technology. sometimes i want to be a luddite and live in a cave and blow glass by the beach, but now life is locked to this computer, and computers are fucking ace.

“203. Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, ‘Wine isn’t bad for you if used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good for you! It won’t do me any harm if I take just one little drink…’ Well you know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.” Industrial Society and Its Future

i think ted kaczynksi was a luddite.

there’s something called the ‘digital gap’ - a period in time (basically now) which will be blank for future historians. the idea is that we’re saving all of this information digitally, but then one day something will happen and it will disappear. migrating data every 10 years to new formats is tedious and imperfect.

“The unremitting fear among curators, archivists, and historians is that steps will not be taken to safeguard irreplaceable records of human achievement at key moments of technological transition, and that many writings will disappear through the combination of apathy and neglect.” - Splendor of Letters p.41

digitization ≠ preservation

“Digitization projects for preservation are really digitization projects for access; their objective is to preserve the original by having the access go to the digital copy rather than to the original.” - Howard Besser, Time and Bits p.33

microfilm acts as a reliable copy of the original documents, while digitizing the information makes it easy to locate, annotate, edit, share, etc.

MEDIUM / YEARS
CD-ROM                       5-200
Newspaper                   10-20
VHS                              10-30
Digital tape                   10-30
Magnetic tape               10-30
Microfilm                    10-500
Kodachrome slides       100
acid-free paper            100-500
hd-stone                       2200+
clay tablets                   4000+

Time and Bits, 1998 data from National Media Laboratory and Kodak

Concerning a digital gap, personally there is a period of my life from about 2001 to 2004 that is gone, except for 35mm prints.

“Historically, the preservation of information has involved various compromises, with the more durable materials typically being the most cumbersome to manufacture and store, while the most efficiently produced are more vulnerable to deterioration.” Splendor of Letters p.62

Microfilm has a resolution of 2000dpi, and a roll of colour microfilm can contain about 2TB of data. [source?]

This medium was developed in the middle of the 19th century. It started being seriously used for archiving books, manuscripts, and records in the 1930s. Before the 1980s microfilm contained acetate and is vulnerable to decay, after the 1980s it’s more stable, and today further improvements have been made; colour microfilm is also expected to last 500 years. (colours are historically more unstable)

Microfilm has the reputation of being a dated medium, and aside from being mentioned in spy films, nobody really uses microfilm except researchers and genealogists, and that’s quite boring for most people.

Outside of institutions, nobody really thinks about microfilm.

The smallest readers, like the Anacomp150, were taken on board aircraft and contained technical manuals on microfiche (replacing over 60lbs of books).

microfiche reader, typewriter, computer, in briefcases.

Larger readers / printers could be used in the home, but the reality is that nobody needs to read books on microfilm in their home. Maybe they would like to look at their family photos? Kodak thought so a few decades ago…

But microfilm never caught on for personal use and nobody thinks it’s cool (except us).

microfich reader / ipad

google query:
“ipad”  -  About 163,000,000 results (0.14 seconds)

“microfilm”  -  About 536,000 results (0.12 seconds)

“microfilm+reader”  -  About 32,200 results (0.16 seconds)

“ipad+reader”  -   About 9,320,000 results (0.12 seconds)

libraries still use microfilm. and big corporates. and governments. and hospitals. (microfilm is a big deal) it’s not uncommon for the law to specify that official records should be readable by eye, and that means paper or microfilm.

record players have something in common with microfilm.

record player in a briefcase

the phonograph was invented around the same time as microphotography. today, even though CDs and MP3s offer advantages over the LP, there is something about the quality, the charm, and the purity of the medium that can’t be replaced. this is true. most of the good bands continue to release their material on LPs. most importantly, if you’re into records, then you cherish your record collection.

but with digital cameras, and we don’t have to pay for film, or developing film, or making prints, or storing prints, or anything else. we don’t use 35mm anymore because it’s impractical.

printing a .jpg on high quality photo paper isn’t that expensive, but if you have thousands of images on your computer, you’re not going to print everything; you’re forced to be selective.

the idea of a ‘digital gap’ on a large scale might not make that much sense. but on a personal level, when i think about how many digital photos i’ve printed out, it’s not more than 30. all of my digital photos exist on devices, yesterday i copied 90gb to an external, and that’s not really that many photos. almost everyone with a digital camera, or camera phone, is in a similar situation; our photos are immaterial.

the point is that digital stuff is wonderful, but as a storage medium (holographic storage wow), it depends a lot on machines, and our machines are changing very quickly these days. migrating data takes some effort, and will only happen as long as somebody is there doing it. after that, the data free-falls out of existence.

microfilm depends on machines tooo. a microfilm writer can cost $50000. a microfilm camera $10000. a reader / printer in a library is about $5000. so it suffers from the same problems, and unlike digital stuff, it hasn’t come down in price, even after so many years. one characteristic of microfilm is that the information is visible with just a light and a magnifying lens.

this quality is unique to film.

.JPEG and .TIFF image formats were developed in the 1990s, so they’re about 20 years old, which is amazing because these machines change rapidly. computers in 1990 were using 3.5″ floppy disks (1980, 1-3MB max, final production 2011).

now it is 2010, and the outlook for the future is positive, partly cloudy with a chance of volcanos.

1993 macintosh classic, 2010 ipad and keyboard dock

these two machines can both read .jpg files. some things change, some things stay the same.

we’ve been putting information on microfilm seriously since the 1950s. 60 years of experience producing, writing, reading, and storing the medium. film is like paper. photons = ink. microfilm isn’t a dead medium and 35mm will never go out of style.

so much of human history is recorded on microfilm; collectively we have too much invested in the medium to abandon it before something more lasting comes along.

but, if in the next 20 years microfilm stops being a valued medium, then at least the microfilm readers will finally come down in price, and there will be whole archives of material to collect at the liquidation sales. so much material that you would have to open a library or a café or start a microfilm rental by post service.

an empty spool of microfilm takes up as much room on the shelf as a full spool, or a half full spool. When archiving for personal use, there is more opportunity to keep a collection compact.

viewmaster stereo viewer using microphotographs

These viewers have been around since the 1930s. It’s the closest thing to microfilm that you’ll find in the home. There is a gap between these personal-toy viewers and the microfilm readers for research, and i think it’s an interesting gap to fill.

I’ve been thinking about microfilm since I last used a reader, 3 weeks ago at the library. This medium is so subtle in it’s brilliance, and so under-appreciated by everyone (except us).

INFORMATION:
COM: Computer Output Microfilm
http://home.earthlink.net/~fyiglover/articles/com.html

Scan vs. Microfilm
http://www.westernmicrographicsimaging.com/scan_microfilm.html

Monitoring the Condition of Microfilm Collections
http://www.e-conservationline.com/content/view/628/196/

Converting Digital Images to Microfilm
http://www.americanmicrokc.com/convert_digital_images2microfilm.htm

Personal Archiving: Preserving your Digital Memories
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/you/index.html

COMPANIES:
microfilm shop
http://www.microfilm.com/

scan pro 2000 - nice new microfilm/fiche/etc. machine
http://www.e-imagedata.com/
compare to:
new gear that looks old
http://www.indususa.com/

fuji microfilm
http://www.fujifilm.com/products/microfilm/

ilford
http://www.ilford.com/en/products/micrographic/index.asp

kodak
http://graphics.kodak.com/docimaging/US/en/products/micrographics/microfilm/index.htm

PROJECTS:
Kinkajou Microfilm Projector for Rural Schools
http://designthatmatters.org/portfolio/projects/kinkajou/

PDF:

introduction to micrographics

ilford colour

helsinki univeristy microfilm upkeep

kodak reference archive system

kodak RASN press release

national archives and records administration microfilm

ilford micrographics process

future of microfilm