Microfilm Scanning

NOW is Toronto's weekly news and entertainment voice, published every Thursday.

Historical issues of the magazine had been microfilmed into 35 mm. reels. While useful for internal research, back issues could not be searched for specific words or phrases and were not available for public research. A microfilm conversion was implemented to create web access via searchable PDF files.

microMEDIA was contracted to digitize the film and then use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that we custom programmed to convert the difficult microfilm at low cost. This avoided the need for manual key entry for full text. More than 70,000 pages were converted. A sample page is:

Click on the image above to see the full image and search for text.

No matter what quality of microfilm, microfiche or aperture cards you may have, our technical staff will obtain the best results possible by adapting our conversion specifications to the media's characteristics.