''Vinegar syndrome'' decaying archives of cellulose acetate microfilm stock | Hacker News Reader

''Vinegar syndrome'' decaying archives of cellulose acetate microfilm stock

cbc.ca

35 pointscf100clunk45 comments

The problem is temperature. At sub-zero temperatures, these reactions are temperature dependent and they exponentially slow down the lower the temperature is. Here's a table from a monograph written by an expert,

    Effects of Cold Storage on Acetate Base Film 
    .
    Lifetime for New Film,            Years Storage Conditions
         45                             70˚F at 50%RH
        175                             55˚F at 40%RH
       1900                             30˚F at 30%RH (using a refrigerator)
       1600                             30˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year 
     31,500                              0˚F at 30%RH (using upright freezer)
       1900                              0˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year
    110,000                            -15˚F at 30%RH (using commercial freezer)
       1900                            -15˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year

Source, https://cool.culturalheritage.org/videopreservation/library/...

    > The library plans to dispose of its acetate film collection after the rare film reels and microfiches have been copied over, in part due to health and safety concerns. In its most advanced state Duncan says vinegar syndrome can cause contact burns, as well as irritation to the nose and lungs.

The real story here isn't that the film is decaying, but rather that we don't want these films to rot away while, at the same time, not valuing them enough to chuck them in a freezer and pay for the cooling bills.

The article describes efforts at the University of Calgary to refrigerate affected materials to buy time for their copying/digitizing.

There's also a distinct smell to magnetic tapes, though not vinegar. I'm mainly familiar with video tapes, but I'm assuming audio tapes will suffer similarly since they are nearly the same. In particular, 1" Type-C video tapes often came in hard plastic sealed/locking cases. There were many times we'd receive a very old master, and open it up to the tell tale smell of a tape that was not going to be in very good shape.

I read the title too quickly and thought this was about the indie DVD/Blu-ray/4K distributor named after the phenomenon - https://vinegarsyndrome.com/

> polyester film — a newer film type that can last 500 years

How does one confidently establish that about tech that has been around for less than a century? Not saying it's wrong, but curious what should constitute convincing evidence.

Typically it's done through simulated aging. You expose the item to extremes of temperature and maybe light cycling or something, depending on the environment you want to certify or test it for. Chemistry is mostly deterministic, so this usually works pretty well.

The plastic might survive 500 years but the images on it won't last anywhere as long.

Getting old slides and negatives from your parents will show you that, most of them already faded or color shifted heavily. You still need controled temperature and humidity for that

When I worked at the George Eastman Museum many moons ago, the staff entrance had a distinct vinegar-like odor that I believe was from vinegar syndrome isolation storage for the film collection at some point in its history before the archive building was made in '89. That place has an AMAZING collection.

I don't understand why someone doesn't make a machine that you can put a roll of microfilm in, and it will automatically scan them frame by frame.

Why do you assume this doesn't exist? I'm not personally familiar with any that do, but based on all of the other scanning devices from professional to DIY, I'd assume someone on the internet has done this.

Because the article writes about worrying which ones to digitize. With a machine, one can digitize them all, just by loading in a new roll each time you pass by the machine.

The focus of the article is specifically about the problems and risks of handling precious, possibly irreplaceable acetate stock affected by ''vinegar syndrome''. It warns of a domino-effect once tainted stock comes into contact with untainted. Archivists are cautious for very good reasons. The problem of which items to digitize is a secondary one.

> The problem of which items to digitize is a secondary one.

Not if you want to digitize the most microfilm for the least amount of money.

I approach programming the same way. If I've got 100 bugs to fix, I'll start by fixing the easy ones first, and the hard ones afterwards. This unblocks the most users in the least amount of time.

If your strategy of expediency before correctness was applied to corporate documentation (kept the hard stuff for last but never got to it) good luck with lawyers and authorities. Archiving is a very serious business, particularly when insurance and legalities are involved. Preserving museum pieces is no less so.

I prefer triaging the bugs. If a bug is some superficial UI issue but has no affect on the core aspect, I'll choose to let it linger while focusing on bugs that are actually negatively impacting core use. People that get upset about superficial things are typically just never satisfied anyways and you'll spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to satisfy them.

Clearly, archiving is just the same as your personal programming projects.

There are 50000 reels, and digitizing them is not nearly instant - if you just load a new roll each time you pass by the machine, you'll have digitized a tiny random fraction, without any prioritization.

Also it would be necessary to determine if a loaded roll affected by ''vinegar syndrome'' would leave tainting residue in the digitizer, putting all subsequent rolls at risk. That kind of analysis is way above the pay grade of most digitizer technicians, I'd guess.

In practice, the scanner would be cleaned after each roll. This is how we handled motion picture film scanning. With stock in good condition, the cleaning after each reel is not necessary. I can only imagine that a microfilm scanner would by the nature of the format be much much smaller than a 16mm/35mm scanner. To me, that would make the cleaning very tedious and time consuming.

I inherited a box full of microfilm reels from my dad. Some are 35mm and some are 16mm. No sprocket holes, though.

One option is to dither around, and digitize nothing and then it all gets lost.

Another option is to not be a weird know-it-all about all subjects.

You CANNOT put a slightly deteriorating film into an automated machine, and expect to come back to anything more than a mess of shredded, useless film.

Yes, sure, the group should have done that a decade ago, when the film wasn't degraded as much, but nobody ever wants to pay for the things that must be done. It probably cost 6 figures to do something like that.

This is something people don't seem to realize. Some film will not survive the mechanical nature of automated scanning. The very act of unspooling the deteriorated film can destroy it. I have no experience with this specific microfilm, but have seen plenty of reels of 16mm and 35mm film just fall apart on a telecine unit. The tensions involved will rip apart weakened film stock. A good telecine operator will manually inspect film reels by winding them by hand. This was much more convenient when the film was left wound at "tails" since the operator would need to wind it back to the "head" anyways. This also allows the operator to determine if the film is warped beyond the abilities of the telecine. If it is too warped, maintaining proper focus is nigh impossible in real-time. High end scanners that are not real-time actually have a mechanism to "gently" press each frame flat to help counter this warping.

All of this to say that the digital scanning of a large archive like this with very much known deteriorating stock will not be done in any manner of "automated" way like the GP suggests.

> Some film

So run the rest through the automated scanner.

Oh wait, that isn't happening, either, because they are not the most "at risk".

I can pretty much predict where this is going. It will all be lost.

I'm sure they would be more than happy to do that as soon as the check clears that you write them to fund the project.

My proposal gets the most scanned for the least money. Doing the most brittle ones first is the least scanned for the most money.

Of course, the people that have been handling archival for hundreds of years have done zero thought about it, and they just needed you, so smart, to tell them how to do it right.

I must be smarter, because the HP paper archives burned down because the "smart" people dithered about having an expensive archivist do it.

You must be a troll or someone totally ignorant of the archiving process in the real world. From your posts, you seem to think that the entire act of archiving is the digital scanning of an image. This is just one step of the many that needs to be done. A proper archive would log which operator did the scanning so questions can be be made to the proper person. Metadata needs to be logged so that these random digital images have some sort of meaning. Otherwise, it'll look like someone's mobile photo gallery; just a pile of incrementing file names and dates of when the scan took place. Basic information on which roll would be useful. Most microfilm archives like this already have a bunch of information associated with them which is how the librarians know how to find the roll to begin with. Associating the exact same information with this new scan would be a minimum expectation. Which off the shelf software package, retail or FOSS, would you use to handle all of this? Once all of this is completed, how do you utilize the work that you have done so that it serves a purpose? What infrastructure does this require?

In your simplistic concept of drop in a new roll every time someone walks by, how is this getting accomplished?

If only they had hired the expertise of someone that posts on Hacker News all day!

Archives of precious materials are almost always insured. After all the damage from your proposed digitization, batteries of insurance company lawyers would likely be there to serve you (with papers and/or digitized copies of same) for not following best archiving practices in your rush to digitize.

It'll all burn down or flood out before they get ready to try preserving it.

Seems like you have your work cut out for you, seems more productive than posting on HN all day every day.

Microfilm and microfiche digitizers have been around for quite awhile. One of the major issues for archivists in getting such work done is the trouble with handling delicate items that are decomposing. The article talks about those challenges.

One can start with the ones that aren't decomposing, before they do decompose.

Triage means saving the ones most at risk first.

triage means applying effort to where it is most useful, including forgoing something that might be too far gone to save easily in order to save several more things with a better chance at survival

I should have said ''attempting to save''.

I've had this discussion here before about the HP paper archives. I suggested hiring some students to make snapshots with a phone camera of each page.

The general reaction here was horror. Digitizing those papers must be done with a professional archivist, despite the huge cost.

Of course, while waiting for budget for a professional archivist to handle them with white gloves and get pixel perfect scans, the archive burned down and 100% of it was lost.

I don't think many here have had the opportunity to work with or be in charge of preservation and archival.

When I offered to 3D scan an artifact repository for a rare books library, they declined after some discussion because as appealing as having space for more books was, they already had the facilities to store the artifacts and make them available, but they did not have the knowledge or budget to create, maintain, and develop a virtual library of the artifacts or to hire people who could.

I've deployed collection management platforms for two museums, and the first time I met the person who would operate it, I don't know why I was surprised to learn that they'd gone to college to do exactly and only that. Expertise and authority have meaning outside of tech, and "being good with computers" or a generally smart person isn't a replacement for serving a role in a longstanding and historied field.

archivists hate robots.. doesnt matter if the error rate or risk is lower than with human handling, many refuse to believe it.

Its not an issue of technology but of man-hours to digitize and index the film collection.

We had a vault kept "cool" for old film, but for my money it wasn't enough, I could smell the vault from fifty feet away.

Just be glad it was only the vinegar syndrome you had to deal with and not being nitrate film stock

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