Friday, October 2, 2009

On microfilm (ugh)

I hate microfilm. Passionately.

The way the stupid machine makes stupid noises. The way the quality of the film almost always is crappy. The way you have to trust that someone else has done their job properly and taken adequate pictures of the documents you need to examine for your research. The way the pictures you take of the screen turn out even worse than the pictures you take of actual documents, because, duh, it’s a picture of a screen showing a badly taken photograph. The way you still have to rotate the images afterwards, and the intense hate you felt the brief half an hour you spent in the microfilm room comes flushing back over you like a ricochet poopy diaper.


There, I said it.



5 comments:

Hart Johnson said...

I went to college at a time where it was the only option for MANY things... no internet to maintain BETTER images of old documents. Hang in there...

Cruella Collett said...

I actually avoided the hanging and decided that what I already got from the paper (mmmm) documents were more than enough. At least nothing terribly significant popped out from the brief session I had in the microfilm room.

Paper = good! (Internet = sometimes good, but you have to take so many precautions... Paper = superior!)

M.J. Nicholls said...

Can you tell me, O Enlightened One, what the difference between a microfiche and microfilm is? I would like to learn.

Cruella Collett said...

Huh... I guess I'm not as enlightened as I pretend to be, because I've never even heard of microfiche... I have, however, heard of Wikipedia, and according to this fountain of useless factoids, microfiche and microfilm are one but the same thing - only microfilm come on reels (hence the annoying sound from the annoying machines), while the fiche are flat sheets. Or so I interpret.
What you should be asking, though, is how this work of the devil came to dominate the world of research since they clearly are designed to severly damage the mental stability of anyone unfortunate to cross their paths.

M.J. Nicholls said...

Hmm. Methinks the answer lies in microfiche. I love saying that world. Microfiche. Microfiche. Microfiche. How satisfying.

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