What is a Microfiche?

Microfiche is a French word for “small card”. It is made of a flat sheet of a thin photographic film usually with a polyester base on which multiple pages are captured in reduced size. The standard size is 105mm x 148mm (about 4 inches x 6 inches). This is the same size as ISO A6 paper, the international standard for paper size. The film is capable of storing information in miniaturized form. The images are usually 10 millimeters by 14 millimeters in size and can be oriented in either portrait or landscape.

This thin photographic film is used in preserving fragile materials such as archival documents, journals, books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as a method of saving space in libraries and other archives. There are different types of microfiche, including jacket microfiche and COM fiche:

Jacket microfiche are larger than other microfiche, standing at roughly 4 x 6 inches, and can hold up to five strips of film at once. The COM fiches are much smaller but can hold a much larger quantity of images. A single microfiche can typically hold around 98 images.

The documents are photographed and stored in the small space of the microfiche card. The images are too small to be read by the naked eye. A microfiche reader is required to properly view a microfiche. To read the information on the microfiche, a special device is used to greatly magnify the contents. Like microfilm, microfiche is available as positive and negative images, although negative images are more common.

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