6 ms·
''Vinegar syndrome'' decaying archives of cellulose acetate microfilm stock
- WalterBright 3y agoI don't understand why someone doesn't make a machine that you can put a roll of microfilm in, and it will automatically scan them frame by frame.
- dylan604 3y agoWhy do you assume this doesn't exist? I'm not personally familiar with any that do, but based on all of the other scanning devices from professional to DIY, I'd assume someone on the internet has done this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WalterBright 3y agoBecause the article writes about worrying which ones to digitize. With a machine, one can digitize them all, just by loading in a new roll each time you pass by the machine.
- cf100clunk 3y agoThe focus of the article is specifically about the problems and risks of handling precious, possibly irreplaceable acetate stock affected by ''vinegar syndrome''. It warns of a domino-effect once tainted stock comes into contact with untainted. Archivists are cautious for very good reasons. The problem of which items to digitize is a secondary one.
- WalterBright 3y ago> The problem of which items to digitize is a secondary one. Not if you want to digitize the most microfilm for the least amount of money. I approach programming the same way. If I've got 100 bugs to fix, I'll start by fixing the easy ones first, and the hard ones afterwards. This unblocks the most users in the least amount of time.
- cf100clunk 3y agoIf your strategy of expediency before correctness was applied to corporate documentation (kept the hard stuff for last but never got to it) good luck with lawyers and authorities. Archiving is a very serious business, particularly when insurance and legalities are involved. Preserving museum pieces is no less so.
- dylan604 3y agoI prefer triaging the bugs. If a bug is some superficial UI issue but has no affect on the core aspect, I'll choose to let it linger while focusing on bugs that are actually negatively impacting core use. People that get upset about superficial things are typically just never satisfied anyways and you'll spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to satisfy them.
- manderley 3y agoClearly, archiving is just the same as your personal programming projects.
- PeterisP 3y agoThere are 50000 reels, and digitizing them is not nearly instant - if you just load a new roll each time you pass by the machine, you'll have digitized a tiny random fraction, without any prioritization.
- cf100clunk 3y agoAlso it would be necessary to determine if a loaded roll affected by ''vinegar syndrome'' would leave tainting residue in the digitizer, putting all subsequent rolls at risk. That kind of analysis is way above the pay grade of most digitizer technicians, I'd guess.
- dylan604 3y agoIn practice, the scanner would be cleaned after each roll. This is how we handled motion picture film scanning. With stock in good condition, the cleaning after each reel is not necessary. I can only imagine that a microfilm scanner would by the nature of the format be much much smaller than a 16mm/35mm scanner. To me, that would make the cleaning very tedious and time consuming.
- WalterBright 3y agoI inherited a box full of microfilm reels from my dad. Some are 35mm and some are 16mm. No sprocket holes, though.
- WalterBright 3y agoOne option is to dither around, and digitize nothing and then it all gets lost.
- manderley 3y agoAnother option is to not be a weird know-it-all about all subjects.
- mrguyorama 3y agoYou CANNOT put a slightly deteriorating film into an automated machine, and expect to come back to anything more than a mess of shredded, useless film. Yes, sure, the group should have done that a decade ago, when the film wasn't degraded as much, but nobody ever wants to pay for the things that must be done. It probably cost 6 figures to do something like that.
- dylan604 3y agoThis is something people don't seem to realize. Some film will not survive the mechanical nature of automated scanning. The very act of unspooling the deteriorated film can destroy it. I have no experience with this specific microfilm, but have seen plenty of reels of 16mm and 35mm film just fall apart on a telecine unit. The tensions involved will rip apart weakened film stock. A good telecine operator will manually inspect film reels by winding them by hand. This was much more convenient when the film was left wound at "tails" since the operator would need to wind it back to the "head" anyways. This also allows the operator to determine if the film is warped beyond the abilities of the telecine. If it is too warped, maintaining proper focus is nigh impossible in real-time. High end scanners that are not real-time actually have a mechanism to "gently" press each frame flat to help counter this warping. All of this to say that the digital scanning of a large archive like this with very much known deteriorating stock will not be done in any manner of "automated" way like the GP suggests.
- WalterBright 3y ago> Some film So run the rest through the automated scanner. Oh wait, that isn't happening, either, because they are not the most "at risk". I can pretty much predict where this is going. It will all be lost.
- dylan604 3y agoI'm sure they would be more than happy to do that as soon as the check clears that you write them to fund the project.
- cf100clunk 3y agoMicrofilm and microfiche digitizers have been around for quite awhile. One of the major issues for archivists in getting such work done is the trouble with handling delicate items that are decomposing. The article talks about those challenges.
- WalterBright 3y agoOne can start with the ones that aren't decomposing, before they do decompose.
- cf100clunk 3y agoTriage means saving the ones most at risk first.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agotriage means applying effort to where it is most useful, including forgoing something that might be too far gone to save easily in order to save several more things with a better chance at survival
- cf100clunk 3y agoI should have said ''attempting to save''.
- WalterBright 3y agoI've had this discussion here before about the HP paper archives. I suggested hiring some students to make snapshots with a phone camera of each page. The general reaction here was horror. Digitizing those papers must be done with a professional archivist, despite the huge cost. Of course, while waiting for budget for a professional archivist to handle them with white gloves and get pixel perfect scans, the archive burned down and 100% of it was lost.
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
- tokai 3y agoIts not an issue of technology but of man-hours to digitize and index the film collection.
- dylan604 3y agoThere's also a distinct smell to magnetic tapes, though not vinegar. I'm mainly familiar with video tapes, but I'm assuming audio tapes will suffer similarly since they are nearly the same. In particular, 1" Type-C video tapes often came in hard plastic sealed/locking cases. There were many times we'd receive a very old master, and open it up to the tell tale smell of a tape that was not going to be in very good shape.
- hexis 3y agoI read the title too quickly and thought this was about the indie DVD/Blu-ray/4K distributor named after the phenomenon - https://vinegarsyndrome.com/ https://vinegarsyndrome.com/
- abeppu 3y ago> polyester film — a newer film type that can last 500 years How does one confidently establish that about tech that has been around for less than a century? Not saying it's wrong, but curious what should constitute convincing evidence.
- mrguyorama 3y agoTypically it's done through simulated aging. You expose the item to extremes of temperature and maybe light cycling or something, depending on the environment you want to certify or test it for. Chemistry is mostly deterministic, so this usually works pretty well.
- lm28469 3y agoThe plastic might survive 500 years but the images on it won't last anywhere as long. Getting old slides and negatives from your parents will show you that, most of them already faded or color shifted heavily. You still need controled temperature and humidity for that
- areoform 3y agoThe problem is temperature. At sub-zero temperatures, these reactions are temperature dependent and they exponentially slow down the lower the temperature is. Here's a table from a monograph written by an expert, Effects of Cold Storage on Acetate Base Film . Lifetime for New Film, Years Storage Conditions 45 70˚F at 50%RH 175 55˚F at 40%RH 1900 30˚F at 30%RH (using a refrigerator) 1600 30˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year 31,500 0˚F at 30%RH (using upright freezer) 1900 0˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year 110,000 -15˚F at 30%RH (using commercial freezer) 1900 -15˚F at 30%RH + 5 days-out-of-storage/year Source, https://cool.culturalheritage.org/videopreservation/library/cold_storage_of_cultural_artifacts_16v.pdf https://cool.culturalheritage.org/videopreservation/library/... > The library plans to dispose of its acetate film collection after the rare film reels and microfiches have been copied over, in part due to health and safety concerns. In its most advanced state Duncan says vinegar syndrome can cause contact burns, as well as irritation to the nose and lungs. The real story here isn't that the film is decaying, but rather that we don't want these films to rot away while, at the same time, not valuing them enough to chuck them in a freezer and pay for the cooling bills.
- cf100clunk 3y agoThe article describes efforts at the University of Calgary to refrigerate affected materials to buy time for their copying/digitizing.
- at_a_remove 3y agoWe had a vault kept "cool" for old film, but for my money it wasn't enough, I could smell the vault from fifty feet away.
- dylan604 3y agoJust be glad it was only the vinegar syndrome you had to deal with and not being nitrate film stock
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rpd9803 3y agoWhen I worked at the George Eastman Museum many moons ago, the staff entrance had a distinct vinegar-like odor that I believe was from vinegar syndrome isolation storage for the film collection at some point in its history before the archive building was made in '89. That place has an AMAZING collection.