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Microfilm Formats
Microfilm Services
How We
Can Help
105mm Fiche
35mm and 16mm RollFilm
Microfiche and Jacket
Aperture Card
COM Fiche
the many types of Mircofilm
And it is still being Created!
Information
Microfilm Types
With the newer technology of scanning, microfilm creation is becoming more and more specialist. There are a number of microfilm formats described below, for each format there will have been an original created, this is often referred to as the Master, Silver, or Master Silver. From this Master, copies can be created, this are usually referred to as Diazo copies. The Masters are the best quality and normally archived, the Diazo copies are used as the working copies, the quality not so good as it is another generation down.
Aperture cards are generally used for microfilming drawings, the cardboard mount holds a 35mm frame of the microfilmed drawing. The card is then used to as the index. The card will typically contain detail such as the Drawing Number, Issue, Sheet Number etc.
Some aperture cards may contain an indexing code called Hollerith Index Data. Hollerith is a series of holes punched through the card which represent the index data, it is a similar principle to a barcode. The hollerith data can be used at a later date to automatically index the aperture card should it be scanned or duplicated.
35mm rollfilm, like aperture cards is used for drawings, or newspaper archives. A 35mm wide roll of microfilm is 30 meters long and typically contains about 550 frames. 35mm Rollfilms, depending on the process, can the chopped up and mounted into aperture cards.
16mm Rollfilm is used to microfilm documents. A roll of 16mm microfilm is 30 meters long and typically contains about 2500 16mm frames. There may be separation sheets inserted between different files on the same film to aid searching for a file.
A microfiche is a postcard size item which contains a number of frames. A microfiche, or jacket is made by chopping up a rollfilm, either 16mm or 35mm roll film and inserting the chopped strips into the jacket. Hence there are 16mm Jackets and 35mm Jackets. There are also 16/36mm combination jackets, these are jackets that contain strips of 35mm and 16mm. Typically a combination jacket will have 3 strips of 16mm and 1 strip of 35mm.
A microfilm jacket may be duplicated onto Diazo film, this is usually referred to as a fiche. Fiche are often created from other sources too, for example COM fiche is electronically generated from digital data.
Companies House often issue fiche containing company information, this can be scanned using our scanning service, assuming that there are permission to copy them of course!