So you just started your internship! It’s so exciting. You can’t wait to show your supervisor everything you’re capable of. You don’t need direct supervision and, what’s even better, your supervisor agrees! Surely you can do your own research, you are, after all, a fourth year student.
There’s just one problem: you’ve never needed to read microfilm before. This is no fault of your own. If you, like me, study far enough in the past there is no microfilm to read! Never fear! I will show you how to locate and load and use a microfilm reader.
Your microfilm will likely be in a cabinet like this one
but if you can’t find it it’s best to ask, I asked one of the librarians my first time. The film itself is kept in these nicely labeled boxes.
Here’s the one I need: The Oakville Daily Journal-Record July-September 1967.
This is the reader I use. If you pull the tray all the way out this diagram shows up on your screen. It’s very easy to follow.
This is what the set up will look like when you’ve finished loading the reader.
Your controls are on the screen. The ones in the smaller box are the most important. You have: rewind, quick back, back, forward, and quick forward. You also have this sliding dial at the top. With your mouse you can drag it forward or back for an even slower scroll through the film. You can also use the arrow keys on your keyboard for that. You can shift the film by hand using the black tray to see tops or bottoms of pages or when you zoom in to a particular part.
The large control box has oodles of buttons but the ones important to you are Align, crop and either Send to Email or Send to Drive. I use Send to Drive so I have all my images on my thumb-drive.
On the screen you can see the film and a square made of dotted lines, the one for this model is green. This is your cropping out line. You can make it as big or as small as you want so if you want a whole page like this you keep it big.
If you just want a smaller section you use a smaller box like this
While reading the film takes time, especially when, like me, you have a year to look through there are ways to make it easier. Part of my project is reading these comic strips about Canada called It Happened In Canada. They look like this
but I can take a few minutes to read something that catches my eye like
All Photos copyright N. Chomitz. All Newspaper articles property of Oakville Public Library.