Losing Our Memory/Space: the first frontier

by David S. Ferriero

Once upon a time, in the antediluvian days before the Internet (imagine such a time, boys and girls), historical records primarily were written on paper. Anyone with a filing cabinet or desk drawer knows just how quickly paper takes up space. For the National Archives, space—or the lack of it—was the first frontier.

The first approach to the lack of space was to create more of it. Necessity became the mother of retrofitting existing space within the National Archives building. A kind of warren exists in the stacks, half-floors and secret passageways that may well contain a secret cat or two. [Reminiscent of 28-48 Perkins.] More buildings were built.

At the same time, engineers realized that another solution would be to make the paper itself smaller. Microfilm. Archives and libraries began using microfilm in the mid-20th century as a preservation strategy and as a space-saving measure. In his 1945 book, The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library, Fremont Rider, the director of the Olin Library at Wesleyan University, calculated that research libraries were doubling in space every sixteen years. His suggested solution was microfilming.

Compression is obviously a great space-saving idea. Microfilm also allowed for access to fragile materials and is a stable archival form. Preservation-standard film has an estimated life of about 500 years under appropriate storage conditions. It is an analog version of an analog original, requiring no software to decode the data. One only needs magnification.

Problem solved. Raise your hands if you prefer sitting at a microfilm reader over sitting in front of a computer screen. The disadvantages of microfilm are also fairly obvious. One needs magnification, usually on a difficult-to-use machine, requiring careful winding and rewinding. And often the quality is poor, especially in terms of photographs and color. Nicholson Baker raised that point in his book Double Fold, which quite rightly took on the shame of microfilming newspapers while discarding the originals, and the resultant loss of information. Furthermore, like all analog media formats, microfilm is lacking in digital’s ability to be indexed and searched easily.