The Advantages of Converting Microfiche to Digital Form

Sheets of microfiche are fragile and need dry, cool environments to prevent deterioration and tearing. While they serve an important role in the preservation of history, microfiche takes up storage space, requires time to find the appropriate images and needs special machinery to read the film. By converting microfiche to a digitized form with the help of document imaging services, your company can maximize its physical storage space and preserve the documents with a more permanent solution.

The Benefits of Document Imaging Services for Microfiche Records

• Reduced costs: Depending on the amount of microfiche that your organization has, you may need to rent storage space. When you digitize the images on microfiche, your organization can reclaim the space that the film and special equipment took up and reduce the energy costs related to maintaining the climate-controlled environment.
• Image and document protection: Digital images don’t require gloved hands and machinery to view or print. Document imaging services save the scanned images in the digital format of your choice and upload them to a secure server.
• Increase efficiencies: When you have digital copies of microfiche records, you no longer have to search through shelves to find the drawers or boxes with the right films. Thanks to modern technology, you instantly retrieve the images or documents you need. If the document imaging service uses optical character recognition software, you can also perform full-text searches. Special software also allows you to update or redact the information found on the images without altering the original file. This is beneficial if your organization needs, for example, to share a document without including sensitive information, such as Social Security numbers.
• Ensure document security: Microfiche is vulnerable to moisture and may be difficult to recover after a theft, fire or flood, depending on the extent of the damage. By preserving the images in a digital format, it’s simple to create backups on external storage devices and servers. Password protection and encryption capabilities further protect the digital files.
• Provide easy access to important information: Sharing microfiche images require a special printer. By converting the images on the film into a digital format, they’re simple to upload to websites, attach to email messages and share online. The images are also simple to print, fax and save to portable drives and USBs.

Microfiche and microfilm served a valuable purpose for several decades. In today’s digital age, it’s easier than ever to preserve the invaluable information on micro images. Depending on the condition of the microfiche, it’s not unusual for the visual quality of the digital image to be better than the quality of the image on the film. Digitizing microfiche images is also vital to disaster recovery and disaster planning. Polygon offers restoration services for microfiche and other types of film exposed to moisture. Because time is of the essence when it comes to the successful recovery of film, the specialists at Polygon recommend that you take a proactive approach to document recovery and use document imaging services before a disaster occurs. Contact Polygon to learn more about film and document recovery or to creating a disaster preparedness plan for your organization.

[Photo by Frederic BISSON via CC License 2.0]