Quote to Note: Microfilm Innovation
November 7, 2013
My Overflight service delivered a gem to me this morning. The hot news concerns an executive shuffle. But deep within the comments about libraries and innovation was this paragraph:
To commemorate this pivotal milestone, the company [ProQuest (UMI)] created a comic book that tells the story in true superhero fashion of how microfilm became the gold standard for information preservation. Eugene B. Power and the Wild Beginnings of UMI is available in print and e-book format.
Fascinating. I recall the joy of searching microfilm when I was but a wee lad. Turning that crank and praying the film did not break added such joy to my studies of William Alabaster’s Elizabethiad. Search was a process that required coordination, scanning, and squinting. Who needs online? What milestone can be passed without a comic book? For fans of WWII, UMI’s origins are quite interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, November 7, 2013
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One Response to “Quote to Note: Microfilm Innovation”
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Wow. I knew some of the people at UMI back in the 50s and later in the 70s when Bell & Howell and then Xerox owned UMI for a while; their at their building west of Ann Arbor city limits.
I remember some of their unique machinery for creating print copies from those items on microfilm from the University of Michigan Libraries collections. It was a similar pre-Google Books project, but prints were made only on demand (when an order was received.)