Is microfiche still a useful storage format?

Not for active use. Microfiche readers are becoming obsolete, searching is manual and slow, images cannot be shared digitally, and film degrades over time. Organisations with existing microfiche collections should plan to digitise them before reader equipment becomes unavailable and film quality deteriorates further.

How much does it cost to digitise microfiche?

Microfiche scanning typically costs £1-5 per fiche or 5-15p per image frame. OCR adds 1-3p per image if the original quality is sufficient. A collection of 5,000 fiche costs approximately £10,000 to digitise. Costs vary with image density per fiche, quality requirements and whether OCR is needed.

Is Microfiche Still Relevant Compared to Digital Scanning?

Microfiche — those small sheets of film containing miniaturised document images — was a revolutionary storage technology in the 1970s and 1980s. It allowed organisations to store thousands of pages in a fraction of the space required by paper. But in the age of digital scanning and searchable PDFs, does microfiche still have a role?

What Microfiche Is

Microfiche is a flat sheet of film, typically 105mm × 148mm (about the size of an index card), containing up to 98 miniaturised page images arranged in a grid. Microfilm is the rolled equivalent — a continuous strip of film containing sequential page images. Both require a reader machine (essentially a magnifying projector) to view the images.

Microfiche was widely used by banks, local authorities, NHS organisations, government departments, insurance companies and utilities to archive large volumes of records. Many of these organisations still hold significant microfiche collections.

The Problems with Microfiche Today

Reader Equipment

Microfiche readers are no longer manufactured by most suppliers. Existing machines are ageing, and spare parts are increasingly difficult to source. When your reader breaks down — and eventually it will — replacing it becomes progressively harder and more expensive.

Access and Searchability

Finding a specific document on microfiche means knowing which fiche it is on, loading it into a reader, and manually navigating through the miniaturised images. There is no keyword search, no OCR, no way to jump directly to a specific page. For a large collection, retrieving a single document can take 15-30 minutes.

Sharing

A microfiche image cannot be emailed, uploaded or shared digitally without first being scanned or photographed. In an era where colleagues, clients and regulators expect instant digital access to documents, microfiche is a bottleneck.

Quality Degradation

Film deteriorates over time, particularly if storage conditions are not ideal. Fading, scratching and vinegar syndrome (a chemical decomposition of acetate film) can render microfiche unreadable. If your collection is 30-40 years old and has been stored in variable conditions, some images may already be compromised.

Digitising Microfiche

Microfiche can be converted to digital files using specialised microfiche scanners. The process captures each frame as a digital image, which can then be assembled into PDFs, processed with OCR, and integrated into your digital archive.

Typical costs for microfiche digitisation:

Per fiche: £1-£5 per fiche (depending on the number of images per fiche and quality requirements)
Per frame/image: 5p-15p per image
OCR processing: 1-3p per image (if the original documents are typed text at sufficient quality)
A typical project: A collection of 5,000 fiche at £2 per fiche = approximately £10,000

Should You Digitise Now?

If you still rely on microfiche for active information retrieval, digitising sooner rather than later is strongly recommended. Reader equipment is increasingly scarce, technicians who can maintain it are retiring, and film quality continues to deteriorate. Waiting makes the project more expensive (as specialist equipment and expertise become rarer) and riskier (as film degrades).

If your microfiche collection is purely archival — rarely or never accessed — you can afford to be more relaxed. But consider whether the retention period for those records has expired. If the information is no longer needed, destruction may be more appropriate than preservation.

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