For those who research in microfilm in Montreal, we have had the godsend gift of many old newspapers onto the net from Google. For the papers that didn't make the cut, such as the never-disappointed Allo Police, it's off to the big library on Berri.
You can jam your USB memory into the computer there and save any page. Alas it's a very slow process as the little arm has to literally slide down in front of the microfilm.
One page could take quite some time, like one minute. It's a drag.
So anybody with any ambition fires up two machines at once. I've even done three at a time. But the provincial library has now banned this practice too, when you try to sign onto another it will refuse you. So the quality of the experience of reading old microfilms at the BANQ has further eroded. Meanwhile the City of Montreal's archives now contains this sleek baby, it's the newer generation of microfilm reader. It can scan a page onto the USB instantly and has a pretty neat interface. Hopefully the BANQ will dump its microfilm readers and replace them with these babes, they're a beaut!
My summer job is scanning microfilm @ Concordia and they have three of these scanners. They TOTALLY RULE. The old-fashioned scanners are so slow.
ReplyDeleteI have just noticed today that Google Archives has "upgraded" its webpage.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it's a mess and nowhere nearly as comprehensive or user-friendly as it originally was.
For all of its flaws, at least the previous archive research page brought down multiple articles relevant to what researchers were seeking. The new page is terrible!
I have already sent an email of complaint to Google about this.
Hope they rectify it quickly!
Yeah, I've noticed it for some time and don't like it one bit either, but at least it's not as bad as the BANQ decision to re-do their scanned newspapers, which has zapped the hundreds of links I have put on this site to various stories from Le Petit Journal and La Patrie.
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