What Is Microfiche?

shukla7789 · Post by **shukla7789** » Wed Jul 02, 2025 3:56 am

Microfiche is a flat sheet of film that holds dozens—sometimes hundreds—of miniaturized document images. It’s been a common format for archiving newspapers, court documents, government records, and more since the 20th century.

Why Is Microfiche Digitization Important?

“Materials on microfiche are an important part of our country’s history, but right now they are often only available online from expensive databases. We are excited that this project will digitize court photo restoration service from our collection and make them freely available to everyone,” said Leslie Street, Director of the Wolf Law Library of William and Mary College.

“Thousands of documents and reports from across the federal government were distributed in microfiche to Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries around the country from 1970 – 2022. While important for space-saving and preservation, microfiche has long been problematic for public access. So this digitization work of Democracy’s Library is incredibly important and will unlock free access to this essential historic public domain corpus to readers and researchers around the world!” noted James R. Jacobs, US government information librarian and co-author of the recently published book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.

To learn more about the importance of microformats like microfiche and microfilm, read Brewster Kahle’s essay, “Microfilm: The Rise, Fall, and New Life of Microfilm Collections.“

About Democracy’s Library
Democracy’s Library is the Internet Archive’s ambitious project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications. From environmental impact reports to court decisions, these materials are essential for accountability, scholarship, and civic engagement.

The microfiche collections that will be digitized in this process include US GPO documents, Canadian government documents, US court documents, and UN publications. We are always looking for more collections to be donated.