When choosing a vendor, they must not only understand the importance of fulfilling the needs of your office but also understand the inter workings and requirements and not consider it’s just another run of the mill project.

The proposal should clearly define your expectations and what the end product should be. There must be checks and balances to account for all volumes and all pages because of problems that may exist in all old security film such as duplicate pages, miscellaneous targets, retakes, A and B sequence pages, missing pages or retakes spliced out of sequence.

It is necessary for the vendor to edit each roll of film to ensure all pages are accounted for and all images are readable. All pages converted must be identified with the proper indexed information in a format so that the vendor may upload to your current system. There should be a procedure set up so that if there are any missing or unreadable images, there is a method to handle.

Vinegar Syndrome

Vinegar Syndrome is a deterioration of your archival film. Rather than just duplicating your archival film to a new silver copy, you may want to consider film to image as your first step.

Benefits of Microfilm to Image

• By merely duplicating your film to film you have spent money and all you have gained is a copy of your original film. Going from film to image and having your film reviewed page by page provides the opportunity to find any pages that, for whatever reason, never appeared on the film. This also creates the opportunity to edit duplicate pages and unnecessary targets, and place retakes in proper chronological order on the film, ensuring you do have complete data in case the need every arises in the future.
• Typically 35mm microfilm would contain less than 2000 images. By using this method, a roll of film would contain 7,000 images on 16mm. Also 2 rolls of 16mm would occupy the physical space of one roll of 35mm. For storage you would have approximately 14,000 pages in the same space as approximately 2,000 pages being stored on 35mm. We feel the benefits far out weigh the additional cost and produces a far superior archival back up.
• Once all the above is performed, digital images then can be written to silver based archival film, leaving you with a secure archival master. Also you now have a digitized copy either for future use when you move to an imaging system, or immediate use if you wish to distribute or sell to users, or make available on the Internet.