A couple of years back I posted a thread on Nicholson Baker’s book Double Fold, about the evils of microfilm. But—like microfilm itself!—it is no longer accessible.
Which brings me to my point . . . for my next book, I ordered printouts of two huge microfilmed scrapbooks (c1910–1918) from the NYPL. I just got a call from Maurice at the microfilm ordering dept., who says the inevitable has happened: the microfilm has faded (as all microfilm does, eventually) into clear plastic strips. “The type just isn’t readable anymore, no matter how much we try to darken the copies,” says Maurice.
Fuck fuck fuck.
It would take me months to go through and transcribe those scrapbooks by hand, and the library does not allow you to photocopy them, either.
I hope the inventor of microfilm is being tortured in hell, on a never-ending spool under a hot light.
We’re talking tombstone-sized scrapbooks, crammed with newspaper and magazine articles . . . Not only don’t I have a digital camera, but the library would make me fill out and pay for reproduction rights for every page I photographed.
I’ve written to the head of the collection (who knows my work), explained the situation and begged—under the circumstances—to break the rules and let me have the scrapbooks photocopied. (For some weird legal reason, you don’t have to pay reproduction rights for material you photocopy, but you do for material you photograph).
The library institution where I work is dumping our microfiche collection by the truckload - if we can now access it online, it goes in the trash. And it falls to me to haul all the shit to the dumpster out back (yeah, we try to donate it to other libraries, but nobody wants it).
Did I mention that:
That shit is actually heavy by the boxful?
That the corners of fiche are actually the sharpest, most painful needle-like jab ever conceived of, sent here straight from hades, and that when you inadvertently shove the corner of some fiche straight into your cuticle as you’re reaching for a handful, the bleeding doesn’t stop for days?
I think the fiche was trying to off me before I offed it.
I’ve also considered gluing together many pieces of fiche to form bricks, and then build a fort around my work area. Or I could could design clothing out of it like a true Lipstick Librarian.
What kills me is, what happened to the original books, newspapers and magazines? "Gone to Dumpsters, every one . . . When will they ever learn—when will they ever learn . . . "
I used to be the microfiche chick at a big corporate law department.
Oh, how I wish someone would have just taken my life.
It is, by far, the most suck-worthy task in all of office-dom. And it never ends. Piles and piles of legal crap…notes, depositions, contracts, scribbles, articles…all being microfiched by me. It is mind-numbing and thankless. And is smacked of “dork” to the point that I was separated from the rest of the employees. I was stuck in a little room – just me and my dork-scented files. And no one wanted to be my friend. Because I was the Microfiche Dweeb.
Silver halide masters are supposed to last a lot longer than that, if properly stored. Was the microfilm a copy of somebody else’s master, and if so has somebody else got the masters that you can access? If what’s faded is the master, somebody did an awful job of storing it. That’s not the microfilm’s fault.
Not that microfilm dosen’t have its problems, but.
Isn’t microfiche covered with silver nitrate? And isn’t silver a hazardous waste not permitted in landfills while being worth good money when it’s recycled? If you are throwing that much microfiche out then it might be worth your while to divert it into your trunk so you can take it to a recycler and get cash money. The irony being that you would trade silver for coins and bills that now substitute for silver.
I don’t even know what microfiche is, but the microfilm at the NYPL is indeed stored very badly.
It was also badly photographed: tops, bottoms and sides of pages cut off, photographed too light or too dark . . Utter crap. And now it’s fading to nothing but clear plastic. But they won’t let you access the original scrapbooks, because “they’re too fragile—use the microfilm.”
Microfiche is a less miniaturized version of things: I think 100-200 pages placed on 4 x 6 acetate cards, they’re thicker than microfilm (about a half a milimeter, IIRC), and more durable. I think one of the advantages of them was that they could be used by library patrons without any special skills, because they were so much more durable than microfilm.
I thought that paying for such reproduction rights only applied if you were actually going to reproduce said pictures in your book, not if you were simply copying them for use in your research.
I’m sure the NYPL is, like most libraries nowdays, stretched for cash, but this is just silly.
