'Fiche rides off into the sunset

It was pointed out to me by CC that the raging international debate to settle once-and-for-all the question of microfiche versus microfilm is not whipped into "raging" just yet because some people do not have an opinion. Because they do not know what the 'fiche is.

Microfiche is these plastic cards, a little bigger than index cards. On them are tiny photographs of documents.


To read them, you go into a little windowless back room and put them into a giant machine (circa 1990 if you're lucky; 1970 if you're not) that makes a lot of noise and heat and projects the tiny pictures onto a screen.

Can you see why this is much better than microfilm?









Microfilm is the same kinds of tiny pictures of documents on plastic, but on a reel instead of on cards. These reels are very long, maybe 50 feet long. They have many more tiny pictures on them than do the microfiche cards. You put them into usually the same machine that reads the 'fiche.

(In a recent moment of personal victory, when faced with a biatchy archivist, I taught myself to convert the reader machine from microfilm to microfiche reading.)

But the main reason that the 'fiche is the best is that it's so, so much easier to find the document you're looking for on the 'fiche. You don't have to scroll through 500 pages of documents to find your doc. On the 'fiche, it's right there, waiting patiently for you.

That is why I heart the 'fiche.

The sadness is that I think around 1980, someone decided that the films are better. Because they are more durable? (I think the reason they filmed these files anyway was to preserve them, also to save space.) Who knows. Anyway, there are a lot more films out there riding the range than 'fiches. That is why everybody has to get behind the 'fiche!