"From the 1950s through the early 1990s, most film was cellulose acetate-based and known as "safety film," because it replaced the highly unstable and flammable nitrate film widely used before it.
But in the years since, libraries, archives and collectors have discovered "safety film" actually poses a huge threat to film-based archives and collections because it eventually breaks down. "
@deborahh@libraries oh go and the cellulose film deteriorated into a toxic goo too. The worst place is or was the Pacific Film archive. As a state facility it was never subject to storage regulations for cellulose film
@deborahh@libraries The US torpedoed a lot of their their newspaper archives by replacing most of them by poor quality microfiches and then instructing libraries to trash the originals.
We have newspapers from centuries ago. We have news carved into stelae and other stone from millennia ago. Such hubris to think that this week's technology will last the test of time.
@deborahh@libraries I am old enough that I learned to use microfiche archives at school, and nerdy enough that I actually used it really often in order to read back issues of Scientific American.
This news hurts. :(
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