User Guide to Microfilm and Microfiche

By Ronald J. Leach

User Guide to Microfilm and Microfiche is intended for anyone who is just that, a user of these technologies. This inexpensive guide will help anyone learn the best way to read microfilm and microfiche data, and to help preserve these somewhat fragile media.  The author is a long-time Computer Science professor with considerable experience with multiple digitization projects for numerous organizations. He first used microfilm professionally and 1961 and has continued to find microfilm useful throughout his professional and private life.

 

The companion volume, Digitizing Microfilm and Microfiche is intended for anyone who has to deal with the economics and technologies of digitization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aftermath
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223824015

Ronald J. Leach

About the Author I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair.  (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.)  While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States.  We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university.  I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department’s hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users.  We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems. As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads.  I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications.  My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists.  More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television. I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas. My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years.   I was the editor or co-editor of that society’s journal for many years.

Book preview

Introduction

You might wonder why an entire book is devoted to microfilm and microfiche, when so much genealogical, historical, and other archival information has been digitized and is available on the Internet.  Certainly, when I spent my summers working in quality control of microfilmed documents at the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn, Maryland during the early 1960s, I never thought I would have to work with microfilm again, much less write a book on the subject.

There are several reasons I decided to write this book.  The book is intended both for the typical user of microfilm and microfiche and for the person with responsibility for making it available to users and for making sure it is preserved over time for future users.  Since the vast majority of readers of this book almost certainly will have a primary interest in being users of microfilm or microfiche, rather than curators, we will begin describing the value of this book to them.

First, a huge amount of information is available only on microfilm and microfilm, and this will remain the case for many, many years. Second, a large portion of the material on the Internet, particularly material created by the efforts of beginning genealogists, is of lesser quality, or has lesser overall importance, than what is available on microfilms and microfiches that were created by government agencies or historical societies.