Monday 28 July 2014

What You Need To Know About Microfiche And Microfiche Scanners

By Paulette Mason


Microfiche is made of a transparent film and is commonly used to store information, most of them are in a miniaturized form. Because of the thinness and its small sized film, this is commonly used in libraries or businesses to store millions of information without taking a lot of space. Microphotographs can also be digitalized by using microfiche scanners. Microfiche by the way, is a type of microform which is a common term used to describe several ways that provide the same storage and miniature copies of a document.

As we all know, most museums have documents that need to be preserved. Because of this, they prefer fiches to be their primary way of storing these documents compared to the digital ones. This is because the digital ones do not hold enough data that can be stored in a longer duration of time.

Since it is micro, this cannot be viewed by just inspecting it with your eyes. For you to be able to access or observe the content of a fiche, you have to utilize a specialized machine for that sole purpose. This machine will magnify the micro document for you to be able to see its content.

Today, optical scanners are now available. The scanner works like a printer which will scan in the fiche and transfer the scanned information to the computer. Once it is already scanned, it can be converted to a digital format for readability.

There are a number of formats a micro photograph can be converted. The most common and widely used conversion is PDF and TIFF. Some experts said that, if you scan a single fiche using a specialized optical scanner, it will create numerous pages in a PDF file or a number of images in a TIFF format.

Nowadays, modern computers need a certain kind of software to install for you to be able to use it in a way you want it to. In contrary, micro photographs have specific machines that only function to read micro images without installing software, updates and license keys. This makes it a lot more convenient to use than a computer.

CD ROMS can store information for a century, but a fiche can hold it up for over five centuries. This is only possible if you keep your microfiches in a well controlled surroundings. This is also the main reason why museums and libraries still use this kind of storage method.

If you are concerned about longevity and safeness of your data, then a fiche is a good choice to store it. Since fiche is not digital, this means that it cannot be damaged by viruses. This helps preserve information for a longer period of time and is secured enough compared to cloud servers or any other type of digital storage. What you only need to think about is ensuring that the fiche where you save your data is properly kept.

Microfiches are a good way to preserve important documents, however if you think you can keep it safe with a digitalized version then make sure that it is backup either from a safe drive, external drives or a cloud server. In that way, in case if the original one is infected by an unexpected virus, you can use your backup files instead. If you prefer to use a microfiche, then make sure that it is kept properly to make sure that it would not be harmed by moisture or any other factors that can affect the quality of the it.




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