Microfilming in the Digital Age at the Clarke Library

摘要

The rhetoric of the digital age often suggests that information not on the web lacks importance. Certainly for many college students, information not accessible through the web might as well not exist. Finding information on paper, much less microfilm, seemingly asks for too much effort from many students and for some of the public. In such an environment, the discussion over how to preserve textual material has seemingly moved from reporting how microfilm can maintain continuity of information over generations to the more narrow concerns of integrating the most recent software upgrade with documents preserved in the prior version's format. Microfilm, its critics suggest, has seen its time come and go. Like monks in a medieval scriptorium looking at a printing press or twentieth century linotype operators gazing into an early computer monitor running a typesetting program, microfilm operators looking at the data cloud can see their end.