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Microfilm Must Die!

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My good friend Bob Zagami (former AIIM Chairman) took me to task here on the AIIM website for not talking about film when I gave the Industry Predictions for 2012. (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/expert/Industry-Predictions-for-2012) It was a criticism repeated in other forums by some of my longtime (by which, I mean “old”) industry friends who also wanted to support microfilm, especially as a preservation strategy.   These antiquarians may be brilliant and have greatly contributed to the success of the entire industry, but they are dead wrong when it comes to microfilm being useful in today’s digital world.

Microfilm Must Die.

The costs are just too great to continue to use microfilm.  Let’s ignore the costs of taking a picture of a piece of paper or taking a digital image and printing to film (an absurd concept in these modern times).

A 16mm roll film costs about $45 including the film and developing.  Each roll can hold about 10,000 images at 40x reduction.  Most film is probably produced at 32x reduction and a little is produced at 42x reduction, especially when the digital images are the source.  That means one million images takes 100 rolls of film, for a cost of about $450.  Each dollar buys 2222 images.

Compare that to digital.  A 2TB external drive costs just $150 at most retail places.  A single GB holds a typical 20,480 images.  So the external 2TB drive holds a little more than 49.4 million images.   Each dollar buys 279,620 images.  For those of you who actually care, that means that microfilm costs a whopping 126 times more than digital storage.

“But Dan, microfilm is the better media for preservation because it can be ready in analog form.”  Oh please.  How much of your life is digital now?  You bank accounts are all digital and it isn’t remotely practical to make an analog backup.  And even if it were, it could take years to rebuild the data.  Analog is dead.  Dead I tell you!  All you are going to do is take the analog images and scan them back to digital.  (At a cost of about $1500 when the cost for digital are zero.)

“Microfilm is safer for long term storage.”  Wait?  Have you ever smelled microfilm that is breaking down the acetone and destroying itself?  Microfilm has to be stored under some pretty exacting conditions for heat and humidity.  Digital storage has its own requirements, but it isn’t as exacting as film.  Digital images need to be backed up from time to time, but the cost differences are so huge that you could make a new digital backup every year and still be orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run.

There is no viable economic reason to produce another roll of microfilm.  This isn’t the first time I have said this and it has ruffled more than a few feathers within the AIIM community, especially for long time members of the association.  While my affection for the “film people” remains undiminished, my support for producing new film is gone.  So if you have a business case for new film, be sure to add your $0.02 below!

Also, don’t forget to join Nick Inglis, AIIM SharePoint Program Manager, and myself on January 26^th as we discuss “What Every Records Manager Needs to Know About SharePoint But Was Afraid to Ask!”  Register at:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/221098088

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Didn't you say that twenty years ago, then ten years ago?

Submitted by Bob Zagami January 09, 2012 - 10:21 PM

Dan, Dan, Dan,

Why do you let such an innocent word set off your emotional trigger and rant on once again that microfilm must die? You may be surprised to find out how many companies and organizations still use microfilm. Do you think Sonny Oates purchased Kodak's microfilm operations, products and people so he could hold the wake and funeral in Rochester? He's a pretty shrewd bussinessman and I suspect he's enjoying the profits that Kodak would like to have back right about now!

Should I tell those customers that we generated one million engineering aperture cards for last year that they should bury them under the flag pole at the entrance to their corporate headquarters?

And are you saying that all those digital images should not be backed up on microfilm, when the film and equipment are readily available to provide this extra level of security and archivability.

And you will never scan every image on every roll of microfilm to bring it back into a digital state, but you could if you had to. And there are lawyers that will make sure you do if they ask for it. However, logic says you can scan-on-demand only those images required for your business purpose.

So I guess the legend of microfilm past will continue to haunt you and we'll be having this same argument five or ten years from now. We still speak "microfilm" Dan, and we are proud of it.

We want to be the last microfilm guys standing. Oh by the way, we know a little about digital imaging too! If I'm available on the 26th I'll join your webinar to see how you are going to back up SharePoint on Microfilm.

You didn't think I was going to let you post without a rebuttal did you?

Happy New Year Dan, always fun to talk this smelly microfilm stuff with you.

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Cost per image

Submitted by Mike Alsup January 09, 2012 - 10:40 PM

If a roll of microfilm costs $45 per roll, then it would seem to me that 100 rolls would cost $4500, so that each dollar buys 222 images. This makes your argument ten times more right.

On the other hand, I have bought several of those cheap 1TB drives that have failed within 2 years. As the legendary Kodak AIIM breakfast guys used to say, what are you going to trust to read your archived images in 50 years, PDF? What about those TIFF images you have archived? Which TIFF standard was that, anyway?

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Wait. Analog is our backup to digital?

Submitted by Dan Elam January 10, 2012 - 9:04 AM

@Mike is right about the typo. There is some confusion about the TIFF standard: there is only one TIFF standard and it is has been in place for a long time. (What is a bit confusing is there there is a "header" area in the TIFF format that permits extra data to be encoded for proprietary purposes. That has been used for different needs. But it doesn't affect the viewing of the images and isn't part of the TIFF "standard". TIFF supports multiple compression formats, but those are very widely supported. TIFF is specifically used as a preservation standard.

The current microfilm business (and a lot of the document management software business to be fair) is based on maintenance revenue. That recurring revenue that is easy to predict and very profitable.

@Bob asks "And are you saying that all those digital images should not be backed up on microfilm, when the film and equipment are readily available to provide this extra level of security and archivability." The answer: Yes! It doesn't matter than microfilm equipment is free: once you have a digital image it doesn't make any sense to produce a new analog image. The economics say to just make another digital copy. Even in the "restore" scenario the images are going back into a digital environment. And I haven't seen a big legal case in a while that didn't convert the images to digital. Digital to Analog... to Digital? Umm. That can't ever be cheaper. In this case, the interest on the interest for microfilm would be enough to keep the digital backups! What other industry would even think about backing up digital data to an analog format when they knew they were going to use it in a digital format later? It doesn't matter if it is a database or a scanned image: it is just data that needs to be preserved.

The file format argument is a typical "fear of the unknown" argument. Microsoft Word files (based on the file format for Multi-Tool for Xenix) were produced over 30 years ago. Will they be able to be read in another 20 years? Probably. (We recommend that customers review their file formats every five years and begin making plans to convert to another format if the format is expected to be at risk ten years from now.)

Drives do fail and backups are a part of any strategy. To be clear, the cheap drives rarely truly lose data: the controllers just break and it isn't cost effective to still retrieve the data. But in most cases the data can still be retrieved using specialized hardware.

@Bob references the somewhat legendary Sonny Oates who bought part of Kodak business. I didn't ever see the terms of the deal, but it basically only involved about 10 Kodak employees if I recall. There are plenty of businesses that are built on managing an installed base of declining revenue. Oates has a great track record in our industry of doing just that.

No, Bob, I didn't expect you to be silent on this issue and I was certain that you would have a thoughtful response! Given your deep expertise on the digital side, we are just waiting for you to put those talents to (better) use. ;-)

(For those of you not familiar, @Bob and @Mike are both long time industry guys with deep expertise and contributions to the industry.)

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Microfilm is a useful tool

Submitted by Gordon Hoke January 12, 2012 - 11:30 AM

Dan, it pains me to contradict my esteemed friend and mentor, but microfilm is one tool in my toolbelt, and it has right and wrong uses. You fallacy is in the statement, "Digital images need to be backed up from time to time, but the cost differences are so huge...." For records that need persistent storage:
1) It's not just a matter of refreshing media. Content is lost when operating systems and application software changes
2) It is impractical to keep a museum of old hardware to retrieve old images
3) With every migration, metadata is lost
4) There is high risk that the records administrator in, say, 2032, will not have the time, skill, motivation, staff, or budget to refresh old records.
For transactional records, this usually is not a problem. For real estate, medical, insurance, and other persistent records, this is a really big deal.

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You are helping to make the point!

Submitted by Dan Elam January 17, 2012 - 9:37 AM

>1) It's not just a matter of refreshing media. Content is >lost when operating systems and application software changes

This and the lost metadata argument just aren't true. Today's IT managers are well versed at migrating data and not losing any metadata and it has nothing to do with operating systems and hardware. Your banks, insurance companies, and other "big data" users have migrated information for years between platforms and other devices without any problems. It's just data.

>2) It is impractical to keep a museum of old hardware to >retrieve old images
This actually supports the argument to migrate. Every company is going to have hardware to retrieve data. That isn't true for antiquated microfilm equipment. We could have made the same arguments about keeping paper or punch cards. I am not going out on a limb when I say that digital is here to stay. (Kodak and Polaroid agree.)

4) There is high risk that the records administrator in, say, 2032, will not have the time, skill, motivation, staff, or budget to refresh old records.

First of all, I don't think this is true. Records management will still be important and storage costs will be the smallest component of costs. Expertise with digital storage won't be an issue, but I think it is very safe to say that expertise with preservation for a media that is undergoing a chemical transformation will certainly be at risk. How many people today know how to truly preserve microfilm in terms of heat, light, and humidity. Even the motion picture industry has lost scores of films because of poor preservation techniques. The film studios specifically made an effort to convert their films into analog so they could better preserve them. Every day we not only have fewer people who know how to preserve film, but as a percentage of the workforce the knowledge becomes even less. Finally, since the vast majority of new information begins life in a digital format, going to microfilm actually is counter to best practices even by rigid "preservation" principals.

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Records in 2032

Submitted by Mike Alsup January 24, 2012 - 10:27 AM

There is another key point about forward migration. The emphasis in newer standards, like MoReq 2010, to formalize the requirements for forward migration. Their view is that the evolution of platforms is a given and the important thing is standards for records and metadata to make sure that they are migrated forward in a lossless way.

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Cost?

Submitted by Randy Moeller January 18, 2012 - 8:30 AM

Once again a cost is based on the drive. I have yet to meet a senior IT executive who really buys it. They know their budget, even with outsource, is in the many millions and are under pressure to reduce it. Their budget is all for supporting e-records one way or another. IT surveys have shown 3% of revenue is spent on IT and from that 18% is pure storage. For a $1B company, that's a big cost and cheap drives are meaningless to them.

Even with that, they know that they do not want long retention times on the e-records as some of their systems will lead to a cost nightmare to migrate. I've seen migration cost estimates lead to a lowering of retention times. Yes the business didn't really need them either. Some retention is really based on "leave it to someone else later on." Microfilm for long term storage will be around for quite a while still.

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Microfilm as Analog Backup for Permanent Records

Submitted by Mark Mandel January 23, 2012 - 12:22 PM

Many government records are kept permanently, such as wills, birth certificates, deeds, and so on. "Permanent" as defined by government means at least 500 years.

So an ideal records repository for permanent records includes digital records with a full disaster recovery infrastructure, backed up by analog medium, i.e., Microfilm.

Keeping digital records for 500 years means using digital preservation techniques to migrate to new technology every couple of decades at minimum. So 500/20 = 25 migrations minimum.

For microfilm these days, for born digital records or those that have already been scanned, you create microfilm from the digital image. This is relatively expensive but it is a one time cost. Storage of the microfilm is climate controlled archives is relatively inexpensie because of the small footprint relative to paper archives.

By the way, archival quality microfilm lasts for - you guessed it - 500 years.

The other factor is that sometimes government budgets do not support proper maintenance and digitial preservation of their digital archives, thereby potentially jeapordizing the repository.

Also, sometimes, the repository goes haywire and data is lost, even if DR infrastructure is in place.

So beware of dissing microfilm, it still has a very important place in our RM enterprise architecture.

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Microfilm Lingers On

Submitted by John Phillips February 06, 2012 - 3:51 PM

Last year I was asked by the International Institute of Municipal Clerks (www.iimc.com) to do a couple of presentations for their annual conference in May. One of the presentations was "Microfilm - Why it’s Still a Good Practice." It was one of the most challenging presentations I have done in years, because there are so few instances of "successful use."

Last year I was asked by the International Institute of Municipal Clerks (www.iimc.com) to do a couple of presentations for their annual conference in May. One of the presentations was "Microfilm - Why it’s Still a Good Practice." It was one of the most challenging presentations I have done in years, because there are so few instances of "successful use."

In fact, the definition of "successful" was a moving target. Was the criteria for "success" just preservation of documents, or high usage of the microfilm, interoperability with digital architectures, etc.? This distinction was critical for municipal clerks to make planning decisions. However, there was a wide variety of perspectives on this issue alone.

In summary, there are very few on-going projects actively creating microfilm in the United States. Most of the attendees, municipal clerks, were concerned about dealing with numerous fragmented microfilm collections of aging documents that are very seldom used, such as local land deeds or copies of newspapers from say the 1920's or older. The problem for the clerks is that they have an archival preservation duty for some records while simultaneously facing that 1) no one wants to use or pay for a microfilm reader and 2) the cost of producing microfilm compared to the cost of digital images causes their management to roll their eyes in disbelief.

Almost all use of microfilm is now through access to microfilm images converted to digital format because everyone expects to get to information through an Internet browser. Try telling an attorney that to see a legal document they need to send their clerk to a records center or help pay for a conversion to a digital image. Access and conversion cost limitations alone make it difficult to fund microfilm, especially since almost all microfilm production is now outsourced contracts.

So, the clerk's dilemma, as with anyone performing an "archival" function is that the only real goal of using microfilm is for document preservation. Creating new microfilm is about as useful as casting the document in stone (or maybe creating clay tablets!). When you having two competing definitions of success, one definition stressing preservation, and the other definition stressing access, you will find that inexpensive access by the public will usually win the day.

Sorry archivists!

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