More on macrocards

For some reason, the microcards that were discussed in yesterday's post really intrigued me. I contacted one of Franklin & Marshall College's very helpful librarians, Tom Karel. He told me that the College library did house some microcards. I went over today, and entered a room I suspect is not much used anymore, housing microfilm, microfiche, and yes, some microcards. Wikipedia discusses these technologies in an article on microforms, which says "Three formats are common: microfilm (reels), microfiche (flat sheets), and aperture cards. Microcards, also known as 'micro-opaques', a format no longer produced, were similar to microfiche, but printed on cardboard rather than photographic film."

Here is the shelving for the microcards at F&M, maybe about 50 linear feet, about 150 boxes. (The orange/yellow/gray volumes in the lower right are not microcards.)

Each bound bound carton looks like this:

Almost all of F&M's microcard holdings are of the Landmarks of Science (Series 1), formerly produced by the University of Oklahoma. This case contains work of James Hutton (1726-1797), the founder of modern geology. 

One slipcase can hold about 200 microcards. So the 150 boxes at F&M could hold about 30,000 microcards. This is about 50% more than what was needed for storage of the the IGY meteorological data, as mentioned in my previous blog post.

One Landmark of Science microcard looks like this:

First microcard of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth

Each card is 4" x 6", and contains 100 pages of text. So the 30,000 microcards in F&M's collection would be equivalent to about 3,000,000 pages. 

The pages are too small to read with the naked eye off these cards. But F&M still has a functional card reader, a Readex Microprint Opaque Viewer. (Readex now seems to specialize in offering collections of digitized online primary source research materials.)

The first page of Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1788) looks like this when magnified on the reader screen:

Of course, now we can find the text of this historic work online. Who would've imagined?