Digitization and microfilm: unlikely partners?

I work for a company that digitizes newspapers, as well as historical documents, books, photographs, and government records.  It is great work, and I feel I am contributing my part to making information accessible to more people.  I so remember using the microfilm reader at the library.  What a great tool!  But if someone else needed to look at the same reel at the same time, sorry, you gotta wait.  With digitization you can have all those documents available to anyone who wants to look at them, no matter how many people need to see the same document at the same time.  Awesome!

Combine this work with our microfilm division, and you have the best of both worlds: archiving (digitization), and preservation (microfilm).  The point of microfilm as a preservation media came home a couple of weeks ago when the unthinkable happened - failure of a server hard drive and failure of the backup.  Many, many images were lost.  But guess what?  We had these images preserved on microfilm, and they were re-digitized and put on a new server within days.  Life is good!

So if you think you have “saved” all your scanned images, whether they were old newspapers, books or documents, don’t be overly confident that all of those digits can be resurrected should they get zapped.  If you can, make sure you have the original document on microfilm.  As I have found out, that microfilm may come in real handy some day.