Microfilm—Macro-impact: A Junior Fellow’s Report from the Preservation Services Division

The following is a guest post from Lillian Williams, 2024 Junior Fellow in the Preservation Services Division.

 

Before I came to the Library of Congress, I excitedly told many people about my upcoming internship and the Unfurling the Reel Deal: A Journey Through Microfilm History project. I got the same two questions each time: “What is microfilm?” And “What exactly are you going to be doing?”

I could answer the former confidently, thinking I knew exactly what microfilm is and what it is for. “Microfilm are microphotographs of documents stored on reels of film and were once used for preservation, but now everything is being digitized,” I would respond.

Answering the latter was a bit hazier. I only knew I would interview staff, research, and create a story map. I’m happy to say that my internship experience has been much broader and more creative than I ever expected, and that microfilm is much more than the simple definition I gave before this internship began. Let me give you some bullet points of fascinating discoveries:

• Microfilm was used to send information during the 1870 Siege of Paris. Homing pigeons were transferred from Paris to Tours using hot-air balloons. Once in Tours, the pigeons could be released with microfilmed information attached to their feet to return to Paris.
• Even before the Library of Congress started a stateside microfilming program, it used microfilm to bring foreign collections to the Library. Starting in 1927, the Library gathered sources from global libraries in this medium.
• Letters sent to soldiers in WWII were microfilmed before being mailed to save space in the V-Mail Project.
• Microfilm can last up to 500 years!
• Microfilm can be sent through Inter-Library Loan and positive copies can be purchased. This broadly expanded access to microfilmed materials to libraries and institutions outside of the Library.
• Microfilm is still regularly requested and used at the Library.
• Microfilm is one of the largest collections at the Library.

Through these discoveries, the image of microfilm as solely for preservation or an “old” technology has been replaced by a much richer and nuanced tapestry.

 

Hands down, the best part of the internship experience was interviewing staff across units of the Library of Congress, including the Digital Services Directorate, several of the reading rooms, and the Business Operations Support Section. Through these conversations, I learned the goals of digitization, how the reading rooms utilize microfilm in the daily functions of the library, and how microfilm technicians have gained skilled expertise in this medium.

Especially interesting to me was Bob Sanders’ notebook from when he first began at the library in 1978, which details how he mixed chemicals to process microfilm, how to create targets, how to splice film, and translations for common Arabic words. Bob has inspired me to create a notebook detailing my time as a Junior Fellow. His journal brings to life a time at the Library when microfilming was a massive undertaking and carried out by a much larger staff. Today, the overseas offices continue to do some microfilming, but the creation of film in DC has ceased. I received tours from Reggie McHenry and Bob Sanders and saw inside the microfilm vault and demonstrations of how the equipment like the microfilm densitometer and printer work.

Everyone brought specialized expertise and information into microfilm for me to explore. After each interview, I found at least five more research rabbit holes to dive into. Why are microfilm and war so intimately connected? Why was microfilm so important in bringing newspapers to the Library? How might digitization change things at the Library? When was their favorite collection created and why? Does preservation mean the medium or the information? What is the best way to make information accessible? How has microfilm technology evolved? I’m excited to share my findings with the public in my story map.

Although each person was coming from a different area in the Library, I made sure to ask a unifying question to everyone: What is your definition of preservation? Regardless of the medium or strategy, everyone referred to preserving knowledge of our world for future generations. They differed in how to do so, but ultimately, everyone shared the same passion for and overarching vision of preservation.

 

In my discussions with the staff, I learned some of their favorite microfilm collections. This gives just a snippet of the wide-ranging topics, dates, and locations of the over a million reels the Library holds. I can tell you these only scratch the surface of the microfilm collection of newspapers, music, books, manuscripts, photographs, and scrapbooks from all around the world.

Reggie McHenry, Senior Projects Assistant: Presidential Papers, Lucile Ball’s Scrapbooks, Manuscripts from Famous Authors

Bob Sanders, Micrographic Technician and photographer: Harry Houdini Papers, Lucile Ball and Dezi Arnez Scrapbooks, War Crime Document that was pulled from the collection for use in a trial

Katie Gucer, Digital Project Specialist: Manuscripts in the Libraries of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates in Jerusalem

Aaron Chaletzky, Reformatting Projects Section Head: Japanese A Collection, Japanese B Collection, Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) Reports

Justin Miree, Senior Projects Assistant: Original edition of Don Quixote By Miguel de Cervantes.

Greg Cooper, Supervisory Program Management Specialist: A newspaper from Dachau

Gary Smith, Senior Projects Assistant: Nuremberg WWII Papers, Booker T Washington Papers, Tuskegee Airman Project, NAACP Papers, Vietnam-Era Prisoner-of-War/Missing-in-Action Database

Amir Sabry, Library Technician: Presidential Papers, Periodicals

Jeremy Gainey: German Gazette that ran during the Weimar Republic and a period of Nazi Germany

Angela Cannon: Soviet Independent Press

Michael Neubert: Microfilm published in the United States of sources from other countries highlighting collaboration

Jonathan Loar: Newspapers covering the independent states of Pakistan and India

Although microfilm is being phased out, it has forever left its mark. We can thank microfilm for many of the diverse collections at the Library. Microfilm is easy to digitize, and its peculiarities, such as tape marks, targets, and fingerprints of employees, remain in its digitized version. These traces of the employees who worked tirelessly to create microfilm remind us of the human side of preservation and library work. It highlights how far preservation technology and efforts have developed. It is fitting that they have left their mark on the pages of history.

Special thank you to the Business Operations Support Section: Greg Cooper, Bobbi Hinton, Huey Gardner, Reggie McHenry, Katie Mullen, Greg Payne, Bob Sanders, Mark Wilson, Justin Miree, Amir, and Gary Smith.

And to: Kaila Brugger, Kurt Carroll, Aaron Chaletzky, Angela Cannon, Katie Daughtry, Jeremy Gainey, Charlotte Giles, Hanibal Goitom, Christan Grant, Meagan Halsband, Adrija Henley, Sabrina Hsu, Jonathan Loar, Jacob Nadal, Michael Neubert, Hannah Noél, Amelia Parks, Deb Thomas, and Joan Weeks.

 

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