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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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