RECORDAK RELIANT-IV
Microfiche Conversion System for the Modern Lending Library
[ planetary camera, cutaway view ]
┌──────────────┐
│ lamp array ╱│
│ ┌────────┐ ╱ │
│ │ platen │╱ │ → film head
│ │ ┌────┐ │ │
│ └─┤book├─┘ │
│ └────┘ │
└──────────────┘
(full diagram described in alt-text)
REDUCTION RATIOS ... 16×, 20×, 24×, 42×
FILM STOCK ......... 35mm preservation negative · COM diazo positive
CARTRIDGE FORMAT ... COSATI 4×6 jacket · 98 frames per fiche
ARCHIVAL RATING .... ANSI/NMA Class I (permanence)
ELECTRICAL ......... 208V three-phase · 14A peak draw
HUMIDITY TOLERANCE . 35–55% relative · auto-dehumidified housing
TRAINING ........... 12-month service contract · on-site instruction
$8,490 base · $11,200 with COM processor · $14,750 complete installation
— Educational & library discount: deduct 18% —
To whoever finds this note —
I am writing in the basement workroom at Riverbend Memorial, on the evening of March 14, 1976, with the Recordak humming behind me through its final reel of the day. Tomorrow we begin the Henderson Township obituary index — forty-six bound volumes, brittle as moth wing, currently accessible only to those who can present themselves between Tuesday and Friday afternoons and who can be trusted not to turn the pages too eagerly.
Tomorrow, when those reels are filmed, a high-school girl in Carbondale can read every funeral notice her family ever appeared in. A widow in Sioux Falls can find the marriage banns of her great-aunt. A young man in Detroit can answer a question his mother carried unanswered all the way to her own grave.
This is not a small thing. We are not making copies for convenience. We are widening the door of the archive until everyone — every patron with a library card, every person whose family touched this county and left no monument — can walk through. The history of the powerful has never had trouble surviving. We are now in the business of keeping the rest.
Microfiche is the only technology I know that is durable AND accessible AND inexpensive AND reproducible at once. Five hundred years from now, somebody can hold one of these cartridges up to the light and see. No power source. No proprietary reader. Just silvered film and good optics. We are building infrastructure that does not need us to keep working.
This is the most important work I have ever done. I am writing it down so I do not forget.
— Maude Halverson, head preservationist
Riverbend Memorial Library, 3/14/76