Our regular series on preservation takes a new turn today, moving from the theoretical discussions of previous articles to the challenges presented by real-life scenarios! For International Archives Week (celebrated this year from 8-12 June) we tell the story of a collection of 800,000 microfiches from ESA and its predecessors ELDO and ESRO and of some unexpected plot twists that accompanied its arrival in the European Centre for Space Records in spring 2025...
An unexplored potential treasury
The collection amounts to almost 850,000 microfiches – flat sheets of microfilm measuring around 10 x 15 cm, that cannot be read without the aid of a specialised reader. (Microfilm was used by institutions throughout the twentieth century for information storage, containing images of documentation too small to be visible to the human eye.) There are no longer any working microfiche readers in ESA and so the collection was consigned to the ESA Archives at the ECSR in 2025 for digitisation to enable sustainable long-term digital preservation and access.
The microfiches hold documentation dating back as far as the 1960s and first European space organisations, ELDO (the European Launcher Development Organisation) and ESRO (the European Space Research Organisation), along with some from the later ESA years.
The origins of the collection can be traced back to an agreement between NASA and ESRO for the exchange of scientific and technical information that we looked at in May’s Object of the Month, and the subsequent creation of the joint ESRO/ELDO Space Documentation Service (SDS). Under their terms, ESRO provided abstracts of European scientific and technical reports to NASA for inclusion in its STAR (Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports) database, in return for copies of STAR. And ESRO and NASA exchanged copies of the material covered in the abstracts, either as documents or microforms.
The material from ELDO is particularly important owing to what happened to it after ELDO ceased to function at the end of 1973, starting with the formation of the ELDO Documentation Group in 1974, to examine the paperwork produced by its programmes under the supervision of the SDS. The final report of the Group explains that a selection of 1600 documents of specific scientific or technical value were identified for inclusion in the NASA/STAR information retrieval system, and published in 1977 as ESA SP-1006: the Index of ELDO Publications. An additional selection of over 3000 documents was processed by the group into almost 4000 microfiches, with an accompanying card index, for archiving at ESA HQ. Since the majority of the physical paperwork was discarded after this, in 1976, these physical remnants represent all we have left of ELDO’s technical records.
For the ESRO and ESA material we still need to piece together what we have. We are quietly optimistic that within the microfiches may be documentation filling in some of the gaps in the ECSR’s holdings, particularly for groundbreaking early ESA missions such as Giotto and Hipparcos, allowing us to reconstruct and valorise their technical legacy.
But for now, this appraisal activity will have to wait, since it became apparent as soon as we started looking at the collection that it was in a precarious physical condition and that there was a pressing need to stabilise it...
State-of-the-art solutions to DIY fixes
These issues centred around the physical state of the microfiches and of their containers, with the most urgent being the growth of mould on the microfiches, the dread of archivists since the spores can spread rapidly to other areas! (The white spots can be seen in the photographs below, taken shortly after arrival). To arrest possible spread, and to stop any further deterioration, it was vital to intervene as soon as possible and so the collection was sent in December 2025 to a specialised external company for disinfection and cleaning.
Next up was the deformation of many of the microfiches – that again can be seen in the slideshow below. Left alone, the pronounced warp would make the microfiches harder to read and would make scanning and digitisation less accurate and more difficult.
For this, a more homespun temporary solution has been found, thanks to a cultural gift to a former ESA Director General repurposed as a paperweight to correct the bend. (Yes, that is a cast copy of the Infanta Margaret Theresa from Las Meninas by Velázquez!) While effective, it is, unfortunately, quite labour intensive...
So while work continues on this front, the next challenge will be to deal with the rust on the metal boxes, probably caused by the same humidity issues behind the mould. The unstable housing means that microfiches regularly fall out of place, destroying the order, creating missing numbers and again, storing up problems for future digitisation.
Far-reaching digitisation challenges
And that’s before even considering the amount of time that it will take for future digitisation. The specialised equipment needed to read and digitise microfiche is manufactured exclusively in the US, and only available for purchase in Italy through one approved vendor. While investigating the sourcing of this equipment, we also requested a time estimate from a specialist in this type of digitisation. After doing the maths on their initial figures we are left with a possible 20-year project to complete our collection and the need for decisions on a strategy to address these special digitisation needs.
On their introduction, microfiches and microfilms were promoted as a ‘perennial’ preservation solution. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can perhaps see one of the big flaws in this claim – the ongoing need for them to be read and preserved into the future. These days, how many organisations have readily available funding to purchase such niche digitisation hardware, or can even source parts or afford to repair their old microfilm readers?
Some 50 years later, we continue to face the fallout of the decision to destroy paper records from ELDO and rely on microfiche as a preservation choice. However, we are grateful that technological solutions are available to us to safeguard what remains, even if they will require a significant investment of time!
