Know More About Microfiche

Microforms are those processed films that carry images of the documents to their users to provide transmission, reading, storage and printing. These microforms are available in two variants- microfilm and microfiche. Lets find out what microfiche is and what are its features.

A microfiche is a sheet of reduced photographs. It is a sheet of microfilm that contains information laid out in a grid pattern.

There are a number of advantages of using a microfiche. The best advantage of using a microfiches is that they are compact. This means that they have far smaller storage costs as compared to the paper documents. Generally, 98 document sized pages can be compressed into one fiche. This reduces the original material size to about 0.25%.

Microfiches are cheaper to use than the paper documents. Most of the microfiche services get a huge discount in the reproduction rights. They also have a much lower reproduction as well as carriage costs as compared to the paper document production. Also, microfiche is a stable archival form.

The microfiche is an analog, which means that it is the actual image of the original data and that is why is easy to view. This data format is easily comprehensible to those people who know this language. The only other thing required to read these images is a magnifying glass. This glass reduces the probability of obsolescence.

However, it must be noted the fiche services and the libraries have to use polyester along with silver halide dyes in the hard gelatin. But in some climates this gelatin is not a good option. In such cases, diazo-based systems are used which have a lower archival life than the gelatin.

But there are some loopholes that the microfiches suffer from. The main disadvantage of using a microfiche is that the image in it is very small which can not be easily read with a naked eye. Libraries have to use special readers to read the images on a microfiche. These readers help to project full-size images on a ground-glass screen.

Another disadvantage is that it is easy to misfile a fiche when it is stored in the highest density drawers. That is why the fiche services make use of the lower density drawers which have labeled pockets for each card. Another thing that should be kept in mind is that these microfiches are not supported by the traditional photocopiers.

A conventional photocopier can not reproduce these images. Also, a microfiche can be reproduced by only a limited number of generations. Whereas, the data stored in a digital media does not degenerate for ages.

So, if you want to use microfiche, make sure you know all the pros and cons of it!