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Comment Threads

• JohnS commented on Happy 21st Century!
  Damian @ 734: "Good thinking, but unfortunately microfiche and microfilm are both very susceptible to water damage. The worst thing is that drying it out once it has been wet makes it more or less unrecoverable. The current procedure for wet microfiche is to keep it wet till professional restorers arrive." That's not entirely my experience. Before they started moving everything to personal computers & laptops, the U.S. Army used to issue Supply & Publications Catalogs on Microfiche. I've had a number of experiences where binders of microfiche ended up getting soaked out in the field. You didn't want to...
• Bellinghman commented on Happy 21st Century!
  So I'm looking at somewhere between 15 and 30 microfiche cards to hold the number of page images that a CD-ROM might hold. How do you get 1,350 to 3,600 cards? Apples and oranges: the CD is holding plain text files at less than a MB each, rather than the page images. DaiKiwi should have said 'That'd be the equivalent of 1,350 to 3,600 cards - a stack 10-25 inches high"...
• DaiKiwi commented on Happy 21st Century!
  JBS @ 736 "How do you get 1,350 to 3,600 cards" I was thinking of what a CD could hold as pure plain text data versus what it or the fiche can hold as page images. A CD can hold about 900 400-page novels if they are stored as .txt files. If what we're storing needs the actual page images - because of illustrations, maps, layout, etc - then yes, 15-30 cards per CD. Playing around with a few txt files, it looks like a CD could hold the equivalent of 200,000+ pages of plain text if it was printed...
• Damian commented on Happy 21st Century!
  Could be made differently for the field, and also a store of thousands has different conditions to a single binder. Not aware of mmicrofiche using PET as a medium (in the old days it would have been something with a photographic properties, so nothing as durable as PET), but the trick would be the longevity of the print, not the longevity of the underlying plastic. I guess is you can print on PET using a long lasting ink, them coat that in another layer of PET it could keep for a long time....
• RonaldP commented on Happy 21st Century!
  How about over 13,000 human readable pages on a 3" disk, that is reasonably impervious to everything aside from abrasion? http://rosettaproject.org/ Granted, you need a 750x power microscope to read it (one side has an 8 language teaser of text that spirals smaller to the center of the disk, the other has the 13k pages)....