The Utah Genealogical Society's collection of microfilms is preserved in a special place known as "the Granite Mountains."
Secured in a stone catacomb within the side of a mountain located in Utah's Little Cottonwood Canyon, the Records Vaults on Granite Mountain of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hold one of the largest collections of filmed genealogical records. About 60 meters above the canyon path, the row of giant portals and the concrete building protruding from the solid granite, are just a sample of what lies behind the rock.
A network of tunnels that reach about 210 meters inland from the mountain, stores more than 2.3 million rolls of microfilm, the equivalent of about 6 million volumes of 300 pages each. It also houses 180,000 sets of microfiche, which contain approximately 900 images each. "There is no other facility like this," says Wayne Metcalfe, director of Support and Outside Services in the Department of Church and Family History. "No other organization has anything that compares to it."
A barcode reader is a scanner that by means of a laser reads a barcode and emits the number that shows the barcode, not the image.
There are two kinds of readers: fixed beam and mobile beam. In both cases a light source illuminates the surface of the code. Being the bars dark and the spaces light, these will reflect more light than the bars. The reflected light is detected by a photosensor element, producing the clear spaces a greater electric current in the photosensor element. For the reading to progress, there must be a relative movement of the code with respect to the reader or vice versa, or there must be a laser beam that moves to explore the code. This makes the difference between the two classes of readers cited.
The electric current that circulates through the photosensor is proportional to the intensity of the reflected beam (which is the census magnitude), which as in the case of the scanner is an analog signal. Therefore, it will need to become digital (ones and zeros) to be processed.
Different types of readers:
Manual reader: They are shaped like a pen, it must be moved from the entire length of the code, so that a fixed beam can be reflected and censused.
Fixed slot reader: The operator must move the code through a slot in the reader. It is fixed beam.
Fixed reader with mobile laser beam: An orange-red laser beam sweeps the barcode tens of times per second in one direction. A laser beam is directed by a moving mirror, which in turn directs the beam towards other mirrors. Through the output window it seems as if many laser beams are generated. This allows you to read a barcode that is in different spatial locations with respect to the cited window. These readers are more accurate than the previous ones.
Digitization appears as another of the answers to the problems of conservation and dissemination in the documentary and bibliographic field, offering important advantages over other techniques.
This new technology consists of the capture of images or text documents through a scanning process and their subsequent storage on an optical or magnetic medium. The digitized document is immediately accessible and reproducible through a computer, without loss of quality in its successive copies or accesses.
Microfilming consists of copying text and/or image documents on film support, on a reduced scale.
Microfilming is an archival technique based mainly on changing the support of paper documents, in another that can be a synthetic material. Normally it is a tape of 30.5 meters of a flexible plastic material and very resistant to aging, on which a layer of photographic type material of the highest quality has been deposited. In this tape the documents are photographed with strong reductions, without losing some information. From this reduction or mini-aa-turization of size derive all the applications and, therefore, its great advantages that are:
Substantial space savings (over 98%)
Saving of archival items (cabinets, shelves, folders, etc.)
Quick access and location, and agile consultation.
Security derived from the fact that being of smaller volume it is simpler and cheaper to ensure the documentation against theft, fires, insects and rodents, etc.
Security in the conservation of information and documents, since these in the microfilm are inaddulterable. You cannot modify the information.
Microfilm is easier and cheaper to distribute and reproduce, because a copy of the microfilm costs very little, and being small in size, it has little freight or shipping costs.
In normal formats it is possible that each roll of 16 mm microfilm can contain 2,800 official-sized documents, 5,600 letter-sized, and more than 11,000 the size of a check, and this on both sides.
For the recovery of the images from the microfilm only a device that basically consists of a microscope lens that projects the image of the film on a screen is enough. The search for documents is usually helped by a computer, which is the one that keeps in memory the positions of the documents contained in the rolls. If you want to rescue information you can do it through the screen, but if you want to restore the document on paper, you can do it by means of a common paper printing reader, which fulfills the two functions: show on the screen and print on paper a copy of the document shown. Usually the reading equipment or printing readers are simple and economical. They do not require most maintenance, and the inputs are reduced to paper and tonner in the printing readers.
Microfilm rolls can be stored indefinitely (their duration is estimated at 500 years in accelerated aging tests). Normally used in the visualization, a diazoic copy (very economical), and the original is saved. This is only used to make working copies.
THE TECHNIQUE OF MICROFILMING BY DIRECT COMPUTER OUTPUT – ( C . Or. M . )
Computer Output Microfilm, is a document archiving technique, which consists of microfilming all the data that is generated in a computer and that has output by printer. So, instead of generating the listings on paper, they are printed directly on microfilm, with the consequent saving of money, time and space, since 270 sheets of printer of 132 columns can be contained in a small microfiche of only 10 x 15 centimeters.
The systems called COLD, is a mixture of C.O.M. microfilming and digitization. The print Spool is written by means of a complex software on Ã"PTICOS DISCS or CD-ROM. The image can be viewed on computers, but at the same time multiple search operations or mathematical calculations are possible. In this way the image is transformed to be visualized into data that we can submit to various treatments and selections.
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