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Microfilm & Microfiche

Microfilm & Microfiche Article

Microforms are processed films that carry images of documents to users for transmission, storage, reading and printing. Microform images are commonly about 25 times reduced from the original document size. For special purposes, greater optical reductions may be used.

All microform images may be provided as positives or negatives. For use in readers and printers negative images are preferred, that is with a dark background; the low light available to be scattered gives cleaner images.

Three formats are common: microfilm (reels), aperture cards and microfiche (flat sheets).
Systems that mount microfilm images in punched cards have been widely used for archival storage of engineering information.

For example, when airlines demand archival engineering drawings to support purchased equipment (in case the vendor goes out of business), (as of 1999) they normally specified punch-card-mounted microfilm with an industry-standard indexing system punched into the card. This permits automated reproduction, as well as permitting mechanical card-sorting equipment to sort and select microfilm drawings.

Aperture card mounted microfilm is roughly 3% of the size and space of conventional paper or vellum engineering drawings. Some military contracts around 1980 began to specify digital storage of engineering and maintenance data because the expenses were even lower than microfilm, but these programs are now finding it difficult to purchase new readers for the old formats.

Microfilm first saw military use during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.71. During the Siege of Paris, the only way for the provincial government in Tours to communicate with Paris was by pigeon post, and, as the pigeons could not carry paper dispatches, the Tours government turned to microfilm. Using a microphotography unit evacuated from Paris before the siege, clerks in Tours photograped paper dispatches and compressed them to microfilm, which were carried by homing pigeons into Paris and projected by magic lantern while clerks copied the dispatches onto paper.

By the 1980s, microfilming had become standard policy in libraries as a means of reformatting books and newspapers. Microfilming was a space-saving measure; once items were put onto film, they could be removed from circulation and additional shelf space would be made available for rapidly expanding collections. The use of microfilm in libraries was also seen as a preservation strategy; books and newspapers that were deemed in danger of decay could be preserved on film and thus access and use could be increased.