Microfilm in the archives: past use, present sustainability and future transformation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Up to the middle of the twentieth century, microfilm was a cutting-edge recordkeeping technology, much like digital technologies today. Commercial use of this technology changed the face of recordkeeping, ultimately affecting archival practice as well. The use of microfilm by archives has brought losses and gains in terms of materiality, access and preservation. Microfilmed records of the Department of the Interior demonstrate the importance of information being held in this particular medium, as these reels communicate the history of the dispossession of Indigenous communities, and the lack of Indigenous perspectives in the management of the records and the telling of their own story. Understanding the histories of recordkeeping practices of records containing Indigenous experiences allows archivists to update archival theory and practice to include Indigenous perspectives and decolonize records about the colonization of the West, which is achieved through the incorporation of Indigenous memory traditions into the records, and by digitizing the records and reordering them to reflect Indigenous perspectives. Records microfilmed in the early and mid-twentieth century are now prime candidates for digitization, a tool being used for preservation and access. Microfilm digitization projects, such as The Alberta Land Settlement Infrastructure Project and Canadiana Online are creating a new foundation to preserve records of the past and those being created now and in the future. This thesis will link microfilm’s past with its future, while discussing its current status in archives in relation to archival theory and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".