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Filmless microfilm stations?



I belong to a group that's establishing a local historical society.  One
question confronting us is what to do about a microfilm reader for accessing
back issues of our local newspaper.  I'd personally like to operate in a
"filmless" manner if possible, digitizing the films onto a computer's hard
drives and having the patrons use the digitized copy exclusively.  Is that
currently possible?

I figure that each reel of microfilm should consume about 2 gigabytes of
disk space (assuming 400,000 square inches of newsprint per reel and 5 KB of
hard-drive space per square inch), so the total storage cost should be just
$4 per reel using today's $2-per-GB hard drives.  If we had a
bulk-digitizing machine to dump our microfilms to disk, we could lock away
the original films where they wouldn't get lost or scratched, and we
wouldn't need to allocate money or floorspace for specialized microfilm
readers, printers, or file cabinets.

I would picture a user being able to input a date, and the computer would
instantly display the front page of that date's paper, with the ability to
flip pages forwards or backwards.  Also, if we sent the scanned images
through an OCR module, I would picture being able to do keyword searches on
the entire run of our paper.  Do systems like this currently exist, or can
we expect that they'll show up sometime soon?  Thanks for any help or
suggestions...

- Jim Roberts

James N. Roberts
Ridgefield, Connecticut
<jroberts@ct1.nai.net>

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