Shaking hands with the archaic monster on the second floor...

[1muse]

Good Lord, if I -never- have to load a microflm again I'll be sooooo happy. Though it is kinda cool, it ain't nearly as sexy as Chritian Bale makes it look in Velvet Goldmine. The bulb kept burning out, and the last article I had to view/print was at the end of a spool and the 'forward' knob kept sticking so eventually out of sheer frustration I

Comments

[dr_memory]

To be fair, very little of anything looks as sexy as Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine.

[1muse]

Point. :-)

[srl]

Microfilm gets faster once you're used to working with it, but it's still mindnumbingly slow compared to digital access. And sticking your hands into the machine to hand-rotate the reels is a time-honored method. (Most of the several weeks I spent at the NYC public library involved about 10 reels of microfilm a day.)

I'm glad you're learning the joy of archaic technologies. ;)

[1muse]

10 reels!? good lord! *sits down, shuts up*

[srl]

If I could spend $300 on a portable machine that would turn a reel of microfilm into PDF without pissing off copyright holders, I'd do it yesterday. (Since I've easily spent that much on photocopies of microfilm; NYPL's rates are 25 cents per page. At 200 dpi grayscale, my PDFed photocopies of their microfilm collections take up 400MB and I have no idea how many pages.)

[1muse]

At least Columbia doesn't charge for microfilm/fiche printouts. I think they figure if you need/want the material badly enough to go through the trouble of dealing with the machines, you can have it.