Backstage’s climate controlled microfilm storage vault ensures your archival microforms are long-lasting and secure. Your resources don’t disappear once they’re offsite. Each item is managed and maintained with intentionality by a team of professionals who can easily retrieve your reels to duplicate, digitize, or return them at your request.
Visitors to Backstage often enjoy a guided tour and, at our Bethlehem office, you’d have the opportunity to see the quality assurance stations, peek at the darkroom and microfilm processing lab, and see what makes our suite of cameras compliant with national guidelines. Less conspicuously, tucked safely away down the hall behind a locked door with restricted access, sit rows and rows of archival microfilm. If you open the door, a blast of cold air hits your face and you hear the whir of climate control units coming from inside: the microfilm storage vault.
As experts who have been creating, duplicating, and storing microfilm since 1986, we at Backstage continue to champion its importance within preservation practice. Polyester film is stable, reliable, and it is a compact, physical form of media from which digital derivatives may be easily collected. It is capable of lasting 500 years with very little maintenance once it is stored; simply keep it in an environment with stable humidity and temperature, and it’ll be your first line of defense against lost or deteriorating primary resources.
Secure Conditions
When you first walk into our primary microfilm vault, you’ll see a clipboard with regular check-ins recording environmental statistics—typically, ours supports an average humidity of 30% and temperature of 55°F. The vault is kept dark and closed off from other rooms to help maintain these conditions. HEPA air filtration ensures the environment is free of pollutants and, in the event of an emergency, the vault also includes a dry-pipe-sprinkler fire suppression system.
The RLG Guidelines recommend that first and second generations of microfilm (the archival copies and their subsequent print masters) be kept apart from one another for optimal safety—essentially, don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket! With two storage locations, our primary in Pennsylvania and a smaller vault in Utah, we’re able to do just that.
A Complete Solution
One of the biggest advantages to storing with Backstage is that microfilm and digitization and cataloging experts are all close by to assist with your collections’ future needs. For example:
- Our full-service microfilming unit can collate and prepare your local newspapers for microfilming.
- In the meantime, our catalogers source bibliographic records.
- With archival copies safely stored away, the digitization team can use a newly-generated print master reel to create PDFs, JPEGs, and TIFFs for additional access solutions.
Today, Backstage stores over 125,000 reels of film and 38,000 microfiche for roughly 100 institutions around the country. With staff close by, requests to duplicate, digitize, or retrieve film do not take weeks to fulfill. Delays impact your patrons, and it’s important to us that your materials be within arm’s reach, even when they’re stored miles and miles away.
What microfilm do you have in your collection? Learn more about our full-service microfilm approach at info@bslw.com.
