A microfiche is a card made of transparent film used to store printed information in miniaturized form. To read the card, a user places it under the lens of a reader machine, which magnifies it greatly. The thinness and small size of the film enables it to be stored very easily and efficiently, allowing libraries, museums and businesses to increase their resource collections without the need for additional storage space. While many organizations store records digitally, microfiche records are still created and used and, in fact, have some advantages over digital storage options, including their potentially longer lifespan.
Types of Microforms
Microfiche is a type of microform, a term used to describe several mediums that provide storage for exact, miniature copies of documents. This type is made of a flat sheet of film, usually with a polyester base, on which multiple pages of a document are printed in extremely small size. The standard size is 105 mm by 148 mm (about 4 by 5.8 inches). Other types of microforms include microfilm, a strip of film on which the miniaturized copies are printed, and aperture cards, which are punch cards with a window that holds a single micofilm image .