Microfilm Scanning and Microfiche Conversion

Usually, though condition varies. Film stored in a stable, dry environment often reads well after forty years. Film that sat in a hot storage room can show fading, scratches, or the vinegar smell that signals the base itself is deteriorating, and that is the case where waiting costs you records.

Capture settings can compensate for a fair amount of density loss and low contrast, but they cannot restore an image that has gone. We evaluate a sample first and tell you plainly what will come through and what will not, before you commit to a project. If the film is degrading, converting the worst reels first is the sensible order.

Where the source supports it, yes. OCR is applied to the converted images, and clean film of typed or printed documents generally produces reliable full-text search. Handwritten entries, faint carbon copies, and heavily degraded frames are the usual limits, which is true of any OCR regardless of who runs it.

Because of that, the index matters as much as the OCR. We build index fields around how your staff actually looks a record up, whether that is account number, date range, surname, or roll and frame, and deliver the index as an Excel or comma-delimited file. Between the two, a record that used to take a reader and twenty minutes takes a search box.

Yes, unless you tell us otherwise. Reels and fiche are returned with your digital files, and many organizations keep the film as a backup master for a while, which is reasonable given it was created for exactly that purpose. Some hold it until a retention period closes, then let it go.

When you are ready to part with it, we destroy film securely and issue a Certificate of Destruction, the same as we do for paper. That matters because microfilm frequently holds personnel, medical, or financial records that cannot simply go in a dumpster. Handling conversion and destruction with one NAID AAA Certified vendor keeps the chain of custody unbroken.