The following article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- - The End of Microfilm As a part of my trip this week, I had a chance to learn about the LDS Church's plans for future images of genealogy-related records. I found the plans to be exciting and very important to future genealogists. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) has teams of members who travel the globe to take microfilm images of records that have genealogy interest. Such teams have been making microfilm copies since the late 1930s. The Family History Library in Salt Lake City now has millions of microfilm reels in stock for use by anyone who wishes to visit the Library. These microfilms can also be rented for a modest fee though an extensive network of Family History Centers throughout the world. You probably have a local Center near you. If so, you can rent these microfilms and view them without trekking to Salt Lake City. With this huge investment already made in microfilm, you might expect the LDS Church to continue its use forever. That's not true, according to Wayne Metcalf, the Director of Acquisitions for the church. Wayne is the person in charge of those traveling microfilm teams, as well as the lead person for planning future data acquisition efforts. I had a chance to meet with Wayne this week. In fact, the LDS church is moving to digital imaging. The focus now is shifting from microfilm to making digital images onsite - in the original repositories - with no microfilm involved. The teams will use a laptop PC and a scanner in much the same manner as you and I do at home, although the scanner is more sophisticated than the typical unit sold to consumers. One pilot project in Texas has already been completed, and another one overseas is about to begin. If successful, these pilot projects should lead to an all-digital data acquisition process for all future efforts. The reasons for this change are both technological and economic. Acquisition by microfilm is becoming more and more impractical every year. First, microfilms have not had the longevity that many expected. The original microfilms used in the late 1930s and for a decade or two after were found to emit a flammable gas as they aged. Spontaneous combustion was a real possibility. You can imagine the result if that happened in a storage facility containing millions of microfilm reels. Consequently, the LDS church switched to acetate-based microfilm materials as soon as they became available. Acetate does not create dangerous gases. For safety reasons, the older microfilms were copied to the newer technology films. The copy process induced some degradation in image quality, but that's better than a fire. Acetate microfilms were expected to last 100 years or so. However, experienced has shown that the films become brittle within a decade or two. Scratches appear quickly when these brittle acetate-based microfilms are cranked through the typical microfilm viewer. Even making copies from acetate originals can damage the originals. In recent years the LDS church switched to acetone-based microfilms as that technology became available. These should last much longer than the earlier microfilms. However, unexpected surprises have occurred before, so church officials keep testing these films to make sure they are not deteriorating. Another reason for the plan to digitize is the rapidly increasing expense of microfilm cameras. The LDS church already owns a number of expensive microfilm cameras. However, these are aging devices. As technology has moved from microfilm to digital images, the companies that manufactured the cameras found their sales dropping to near zero. As a result, they stopped manufacturing the cameras for this obsolete technology. While the LDS church has sufficient units in stock today, replacements are no longer manufactured. These cameras already owned by the church have a lot of moving parts and require some maintenance as well as occasional replacement parts. With parts no longer available from the manufacturers, the LDS Church has had to manufacture many of the parts, a rather expensive proposition. Finally, moving these cameras around the world and making microfilms is expensive. The cameras are bulky. As a result, a lot of money and effort is required to ship these units to the far corners of the world. Carrying unexposed film is also chancy, especially in some climates. Adding to the difficulty is the entire process of shipping exposed films back to Salt Lake City, developing the films, cataloging them, and placing them into inventory. All of this adds to the time and expenses required. In fact, Metcalf reported that films typically do not become available to genealogists until a year or more after they are first created. The church also always presents a copy to the owners of the archive that was filmed. These archivists often have to wait a year for their copy. Contrast this with digital imaging. All that is needed is a digital scanner and a laptop PC. The scanner is a bit bulky, but still much smaller than a microfilm camera. The digital scanner also has fewer moving parts and a much lower purchase price. Simple repairs can be made with readily-available parts. If extensive repairs are required, scrapping the entire scanner and purchasing a new one is cheaper than the typical repair cost of a microfilm camera. A "film" crew can create images for a week and then "burn" a half-ounce DVD disk with the image files. They send the disk by air mail to Salt Lake City or possibly transfer the files across the Internet if a high-speed connection is available. At the same time as the files are making their way to Salt Lake City, a duplicate copy is immediately given to the owner of the archive records being imaged. Another benefit is that the on-site filming crew can handle the cataloging, instead of tasking a cataloging group in Salt Lake City. The filming crews typically can speak, read, and write the local language, so, they can more easily create catalog records as the images are being recorded. Here again, more time is saved. Once the LDS church converts entirely to digital images, you can expect new records to become available within days or a few weeks of being imaged, instead of today's typical delay of a year or more. Once the images are available in a digital format, all sorts of possibilities become available. Images can be stored on CD-ROM or DVD disks, or placed online for viewing over the Internet. The LDS church is watching this technology closely and is testing several possibilities. Apparently no final decisions about distribution have been made yet. However, it seems clear that such images will be available in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City as well as in Family History Centers around the world. Decisions have yet to be made about wider distribution. The best part of the plan is in the ease of replication. Making a copy of a microfilm introduces fuzziness, or "visual noise." Then, making a copy of that copy introduces further loss of image; copying that copy adds still more, and so on and so forth. However, a copy of a digital image is identical to the original. You can make copies of copies of copies; each new image is identical to the original with no signal loss. In short, digital imaging ensures that future generations can have the same access that you and I enjoy. So what about the ten million-plus microfilms already in stock? The easy answer is to "convert them to digital images." Indeed, the LDS church plans to do this whenever possible. However, studies have shown that about one-third of today's microfilms are not suitable for digital conversion. The original microfilms in question sometimes do not contain sharp images. The present films may be dark or over exposed, or the original document may be difficult to read. Converting from analog microfilm to digital images will introduce even more losses in image quality. In such cases, the only recourse is to go back to the original location and re-image the documents in digital media. In fact, the LDS church does hope to revisit many archives and make new images, using digital scanners. However, this expensive process will require many years to complete. Decisions also need to be made on a case-by-case basis: do they send a crew to make digital images of something already available on microfilm, or do they send the crews to a new site to make images of records that are still unavailable on microfilm? Resources are not infinite; the expenditures must be made where they will do the most good. As a result of all the above considerations, you can expect that genealogists will still be cranking microfilm readers for many years to come. (Of course, I should point out that microfilm readers are also becoming rare.) We can expect to see a "blended solution" for many years: some records will be available only on microfilm while others will be in digital format only. A few records may be available in both formats. Yes, we will have an all-digital solution some day. The LDS church officials are not making any timeframe predictions, but I am guessing that microfilm will still be here for another decade, possibly two decades, with digital images slowly becoming more and more common during that time.