Several years ago, the Wheeling-Ohio County library announced they were going to give away all of their bound years of The Intelligencer and The News-Register, with any unwanted years getting landfilled. They later changed that to "two volumes per person, extras after everyone picks them over." As the event approached, all three of us went up, intent on snagging two per person and figuring out what to do with them later. We were in line with at least fifty other people, all local historians ready to do the same thing when the librarian announced they wouldn't be giving the copies away, after all, because the newspaper wanted them all back. She seemed astonished that there was any use for hard copy when they have microfilm.
Right now, the state of West Virginia is trying to scan and digitize them all. Because it's a nearly complete collection from 1852 to the present, that means before many years go by we'll have access to freshly scanned, crisp copies of the run-up to the Civil War, among other major events. The old photographs of Wheeling's many unfortunate events won't be blurry gray and black blobs any more (and no one will have to go through the paper's morgue to unearth them.) Best of all, we won't be working from microfilm that has been scratched or broken from much use.

Sorry but that just sounds a bit like an "apocryphal tale", or at least one in which the actor declared defeat prematurely owing to preconceived notions. First the ongoing indifference to keeping documents version-current. Second the registry doesn't do that, so trivial IT intervention here would have sufficed. Third, no extreme-but-cheap efforts like buying an old PC off Craigslist to run an old version of the software, or simply waving $50 around on eLance to hire the conversion done.

This is actually similar to the "backup problem" where a backups are made dutifully for years but never tested. In this case, software versions were updated, and compatibility with existing documents was left to chance. Don't do that LOL.



Only problem with that, is a scanned document is only photos of the pages. It's a photo portfolio with text annotation. This (being photos) makes the document rather large, unless image compression is pushed to the absolute max, which makes it look ratty. If the document is over 100 pages it will also perform poorly on a portable device.

You are much better off developing a PDF by opening the document in the authoring application and going "Print..." "Save as PDF..." Because then you get a lightweight document that renders sharply at any zoom level, and is small because it is simply the text, formatting and fonts bundled together. This also means search and cut/copy work as the document author intended.


And with "over 9000" customers as they say on their website, I too would be chewing my nails as to when the company just disappears. The litmus test for any software like that should be "Can you give me an XML file of my database?" And you should make that regularly and back it up. At WRM they used Filemaker Pro last I looked. It suffices, though an image feature would be nice.


Yes. Housing them properly is the cheap part. The expensive part is "random access" i.e. wide aisles, deep drawers, painstaking indexing, careful refiling. As contrasted with records boxed, palletized, shrink wrapped and forklifted into a climate controlled container, which is effectively inaccessible.

The second is better. The documents are safer (less human activity, less deterioration, less fire hazard), and the digital scans you made provide vastly better random access and searchability.


Yes, that goes without saying. We must move past our "fear of every format" and embrace formats that are very simple (TIFF, GZIP, ZIP) or both open-standard and durable (JPEG, PDF, HTML, XML, etc.) and are likely to continue to be supported for a very long time.


Microfilming was done for ONE reason: to save space. It was not done to be "high tech", it was done because there was no other choice. There were no delusions that the quality was poorer. The documents would be otherwise lost because there simply was not room in a fixed size repository for the (even then) documents that were increasing exponentially.

Today, guess what can also grow exponentially? Seagate. At that point preserving the originals becomes less of an issue because storage can be off-site.