CARRY YOUR LIBRARY WITH YOU

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 50, 1 March 1939, Page 5

CARRY YOUR LIBRARY WITH YOU

JMAGINE a thousand books in a drawer no bigger than a boot-box; your local shoe shop housing the books of your municipal library, the shelves of which have been cleared to make room for all the library books in this c0untry—36.750.009. This is not an idea brought back by Gulliver from his travels, writes Ritchie Calder in Readers’ Guide. London. It is the practical possibility suggested by microfilm, the modern method of keeping books. Nearly 90 per cent, of the literature to be found in the libraries of the United States can now be obtained, to order, on microfilm. The Method. An apparatus has been installed in the British Museum and some of the 5.000.000 books there are being "tapped” by the scientific bibliographers. At present the method is to use ordinary 35 m.m. cine-film. Two pages of a book are photographed on to one frame of the film, and there are 14 frames to a foot. Copies are then made, in any number, from the negative. and these copies are used in the reading machine. This, in its most compact form, is not much bigger than a typewriter.

The imagine is thrown on to a screen, two-page spread at a time. And lhe reader, when he wants to “turn the page,” turns a handle which brings the next frame into position. Nor is this method restricted to books. Two copies of every issue of the Daily Herald are sent to Harvard University, U.S.A. In a year this represents a bale of four feet high weighing two cwts. But in America this bulk is shrunk to the proportions of a fairly large cotton-reel. The Americans have “cottoned-on” to this idea with typical entnusiasm. The rare documents of State, the priceless papyri of the museums, deedf ■n ills, court evidence, scarce books, and irreplaceable manuscripts have beer copied, can be reproduced “ad lib.” During the crisis, banks, lawyers and the like in this country began furiously to have their documents photographed and scattered in safe hiding-places. But we had not learned the lesson of microfilm: it was done by photostat photographing on to ordinary plates. And yet it is so simple. The book, or document to be photographed, is placed under bright lamps and the camera focussed down upon it. Flick the page; click a switch! In the hands of an expert it is almost as slick as dealing a pack of cards.