While Block Chain, AI, and GDPR are new and exciting, sometimes we need to talk about older technology. Most of it is paper which has its own set of challenges. But microfilm has been the court archiving standard since at least the 1950’s in many jurisdictions. Should it still be used? If so, can it be made more useful? We discuss below.
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That said, we know that the standard for state court records archives is microfilm/microfiche. An excellent article on microfilm/microfiche was published earlier this year in The Atlantic magazine. It states:
“The contemporary microfilm reader has multiple origins. Bradley A. Fiske filed a patent for a “reading machine” on March 28, 1922, a pocket-sized handheld device that could be held up to one eye to magnify columns of tiny print on a spooling paper tape. But the apparatus that gained traction was G. L. McCarthy’s 35mm scanning camera, which Eastman Kodak introduced as the Rekordak in 1935, specifically to preserve newspapers. By 1938, universities began using it to microfilm dissertations and other research papers.”But the article goes on to caution that microfilm longevity may be an issue.
“Their longevity was another matter. As early as May 17, 1964, as reported in The New York Times, microfilm appeared to degrade, with “microfilm rashes” consisting of “small spots tinged with red, orange or yellow” appearing on the surface. An anonymous executive in the microfilm market was quoted as saying they had “found no trace of measles in our film but saw it in the film of others and they reported the same thing about us.” The acetate in the film stock was decaying after decades of use and improper storage, and the decay also created a vinegar smell—librarians and researchers sometimes joked about salad being made in the periodical rooms. The problem was solved by the early 1990s, when Kodak introduced polyester-based microfilm, which promised to resist decay for at least 500 years.”So, if your microfilm archive "smells like vinegar", what is a court to do? The simple answer is to do like many of the huge online service providers like Google and Microsoft do, make lots and lots of copies of things. This is easy to do digitally. Say a copy on removable hard drives, and a copy in cloud storage, and even DVD copies ( see the M-Disc part of this earlier article - )
There are four possible strategies for addressing this problem.
- Do nothing. Let the next clerk, registrar, court administrator or judge worry about it and find the money.
- Copy your microfilm/microfiche so that the physical film is renewed. You need to check the age of your film and see when it is expired just like the milk/yogurt in your refrigerator.
- Copy your microfilm to digital format and perhaps even use that process to write new physical film (as former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove titled his book: Only the Paranoid Survive is applicable philosophy here).
- Hope that the state or national government will come in and save you. I never think that hope is a viable approach but, that is me.
If you decided to convert the film into a digital format, you can either invest in the machine to do it yourself or hire a conversion service.
Conversion service examples:
• https://tameran.com/microfilm-to-digital-or-digital-to-microfilm/
• Australian service: http://www.pascoe.com.au/analogue-imaging-services/digital-microfilm/
Machine examples are:
• http://analogueimaging.com/archive-writers/
• http://www.nextscan.com/nextscan-products/
The benefits of purchasing your own machine are that you can potentially add in OCR (positioning your records to take advantage of developing AI-based handwriting OCR). You can also control the data fields and formats for your search engine. And you can potentially make the archive available online (and the resulting benefit of sending the genealogy researchers home).
I apologize for adding to your “to-do list”. But the courts are important keepers of civilization’s history. We must, therefore, move forward by protecting the past.
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