8 ms·

This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum. I

This is something I deal with all the time. I volunteer at our local historical society and also at the museum of our state hospital (insane asylum) museum. I do research for people trying to find answers for their relatives who were patients in the past. Some of these people have already checked ancestry.com and whatever historical newspapers they can get access to. It's getting harder and harder to find any answers online. Newspapers.com seems to have LESS available every day. I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug. /rant I am personally so sick of copyright laws, but I always have felt that way. I just get upset when people are surprised that someone has pulled all rights to a publication on microfilm. The rats nest of legal issues involved basically means that we lose access to things we'd be willing to pay for. The only way for me to confirm a claim like "but it was on the front page of the Denver News" is to take a trip to Denver and try to find the microfilm. rant/

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> rats nest of legal issues Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.
- zokier 3y ago
  Storing and offering copies are two very different things
  - Psyladine 3y ago
    Storing it without availability is the same as it not existing.
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    Who's going to bother archiving something if they can't share it with someone for nearly a century, though?
abracadaniel 3y ago
That’s particularly frustrating since the point of microfilm is that it takes nearly no space to store it, and thus nearly no cost to keep it forever.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I'm not confident in this, but: if microfilm/fiche is anything like ordinary film, it's somewhat annoying and costly to archive: the film itself physically degrades ("vinegar syndrome"[1]) and might be hazardous to store in bulk (depending on the age and type of film stock). (This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_and_the_%22vinegar_syndrome%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a...
  - Scaevolus 3y ago
    Microfilm doesn't use cellulose acetate, and is stable for centuries with minor storage requirements (room temperature, low humidity)-- the same that are required by books.
    - woodruffw 3y ago
      Modern microfilm doesn't; what about the kind that's holding newspaper archives from the 1920s?
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        It seems that cellulose nitrate film stock was phased out by the 1950s: <https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.1-microfilm-and-microfiche https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6...> How widely it was used prior to that time, and what filmstock selection practices specific institutions followed I don't know, though I suspect these may have varied. As for current polyester filmstock: Black-and-white polyester film has a life expectancy of 500+ years under proper storage conditions. (From the same source.)
tivert 3y ago
> I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug. That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.
- scarface74 3y ago
  Random: For the longest, newspaper.com (no “s”) redirected to daringfireball.com. It wasn’t Gruber (the site owner) astroturfing. Some random guy bought the domain years ago and didn’t have anything he wanted to do with it so he just redirected to Gruber’s site. The only evidence I can find of it now is here: https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com
- roenxi 3y ago
  Here in Australia I once saw a community choir shut down over the combination of copyright and public liability. I haven't seen a second choir so I don't know how common that is. While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.
  - maxwell 3y ago
    At least the law isn't the law in the U.S., it defers to the Constitution, and that in turn to the sovereign (the People).
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      This would be the US Constitution as interpreted by a half dozen corrupt weirdos who were selected for their partisan bona fides and can't be dismissed for any reason, right?
kristopolous 3y ago
It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance. I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control. It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste. Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.
- xg15 3y ago
  Or maybe more like a SciHub/LibGen for historians.
- jraph 3y ago
  > It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance. Name suggestion: Hist-Hub
  - miah_ 3y ago
    Or maybe archive.org..
- grumbel 3y ago
  What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...). But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there. The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.
zokier 3y ago
What legal issues exactly does library having microfilms involve?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

> rats nest of legal issues Equally frustrating, this would prevent an amateur archivist (sometimes called a “criminal”) from storing and offering copies of such things.

zokier 3y ago
Storing and offering copies are two very different things
- Psyladine 3y ago
  Storing it without availability is the same as it not existing.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Who's going to bother archiving something if they can't share it with someone for nearly a century, though?

abracadaniel 3y ago

That’s particularly frustrating since the point of microfilm is that it takes nearly no space to store it, and thus nearly no cost to keep it forever.

woodruffw 3y ago
I'm not confident in this, but: if microfilm/fiche is anything like ordinary film, it's somewhat annoying and costly to archive: the film itself physically degrades ("vinegar syndrome"[1]) and might be hazardous to store in bulk (depending on the age and type of film stock). (This isn't to say that it should be thrown out, but that the first step to archiving is to enumerate and cover the costs.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_and_the_%22vinegar_syndrome%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a...
- Scaevolus 3y ago
  Microfilm doesn't use cellulose acetate, and is stable for centuries with minor storage requirements (room temperature, low humidity)-- the same that are required by books.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    Modern microfilm doesn't; what about the kind that's holding newspaper archives from the 1920s?
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      It seems that cellulose nitrate film stock was phased out by the 1950s: <https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.1-microfilm-and-microfiche https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6...> How widely it was used prior to that time, and what filmstock selection practices specific institutions followed I don't know, though I suspect these may have varied. As for current polyester filmstock: Black-and-white polyester film has a life expectancy of 500+ years under proper storage conditions. (From the same source.)

tivert 3y ago

> I go to my local library and ask to see their microfilm to look up a story. They tell me they got rid of all their microfilm for a particular newspaper (The Denver Post, fwiw). I ask why, and they tell me, "you can just get that on the internet now." When I tell them that Newspapers.com no longer has any access to that newspaper, they just shrug. That's just awful and irresponsible. Someday someone's going to do something like that, blithely assuming there's another copy somewhere, but it will turn out they junked the last one.

scarface74 3y ago
Random: For the longest, newspaper.com (no “s”) redirected to daringfireball.com. It wasn’t Gruber (the site owner) astroturfing. Some random guy bought the domain years ago and didn’t have anything he wanted to do with it so he just redirected to Gruber’s site. The only evidence I can find of it now is here: https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com https://feedreader.com/observe/newspaper.com
roenxi 3y ago
Here in Australia I once saw a community choir shut down over the combination of copyright and public liability. I haven't seen a second choir so I don't know how common that is. While destroying the last microfilm copy is a tragedy, I'm less confident that the person is being irresponsible. Preserving culture legally is difficult to do. Some people have weird beliefs that the law is somehow advisory and common sense rather than the law.
- maxwell 3y ago
  At least the law isn't the law in the U.S., it defers to the Constitution, and that in turn to the sovereign (the People).
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    This would be the US Constitution as interpreted by a half dozen corrupt weirdos who were selected for their partisan bona fides and can't be dismissed for any reason, right?

kristopolous 3y ago

It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance. I mean really, we're bound by a legal regime here that almost nobody wants but we're too collectively disorganized to break out of it. So let us embrace that which we cannot control. It's time for mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world again. The centre is holding too long. It's time for things to fall apart. Create the crisis and don't let it go to waste. Let's see Time Inc chase down Grandmothers with million dollar fines for sharing a copy of a 40 year old newspaper like the RIAA did with mp3s. Revolutions require battles and it seems to be the only way this stuff seems to get fixed.

xg15 3y ago
Or maybe more like a SciHub/LibGen for historians.
jraph 3y ago
> It sounds like we need a napster for historians and the written word and then go through the same 15 year dance. Name suggestion: Hist-Hub
- miah_ 3y ago
  Or maybe archive.org..
grumbel 3y ago
What I'd like to see is a global repository of just pure metadata, file hashes, descriptions, thumbnails, everything you can get away with under the current law. That way you could organize all the data freely and publicly, while you could leave the retrieval to other, potential illegal, parties (torrent, IPFS, random websites, ...). But due to having all the metadata, one of those parties going down wouldn't be the end of the world, you could just wait until somebody else reuploads it and retrieve it from there. The main problem after all isn't storing the data, storage is cheap these days, but that the act of mirroring is so damn ugly and brittle. URLs don't last because they encode the storage location, not the content and that's something one could fix with such a metadata database.

zokier 3y ago

What legal issues exactly does library having microfilms involve?