Dear All,
I've been working in document management for the past 12 years, and I keep coming up against the same barrier to the digitisation of microfilm: cost. It seems like there may still be a surprisingly large number of microfilm rolls in archives across the UK that Archivists and Records Managers would love to have digitised, but simply can't get the budget for. From what I'm told the issue is not so much the cost involved with the actual scanning of the rolls, but that it's hard to justify the cost of indexing the contents of those rolls, i.e. you could end up spending a fortune indexing records that will never be accessed. We've been trying to find a solution to this problem for quite some time, and we believe that we now have one - I hope to get feedback on what you all think about this.
Essentially the solution that we propose works like this:
1. We scan the entire roll as a continuous high-quality image, which is indexed by the roll's information (i.e. NOT the individual files contained within the roll)
2. The scan is viewed in a software application that we provide you that displays the frames in rows, and the user scrolls back and forth through the "virtual roll" to find the frames that they are looking for. This is intended to make it as intuitive as possible for users who are used to the way that microfilm readers/viewers work.
3. The user then clicks on the frames/images that they want to save, and the software publishes those images as a new PDF, which the user can name and index as required. The original scan remains unaltered, but the published PDF images can be adjusted before saving (e.g. positive/negative, brightness, rotation etc).
Of course this is a summarised and simplistic overview, but the upshot of the solution is that the cost of digitising your microfilm roll archive is very significantly reduced (up to 75%) and you get a powerful application, to view and manage the images, that is intuitive to many people who are used to microfilm readers.
This solution is already in use in the USA and we are trying to establish what appetite there is in the UK for it. I would very much welcome your feedback, and of course I'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Best wishes,
Eros
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