It guess that it’s been a while since I had to dig into microfilms of old Honolulu newspapers while working on a potential story. But that’s what I had to do this past week to see if I could find any details of an event that happened in 1980, so I stopped in to the Kaimuki Library.

The printed newspaper index gave me the date, and the library has the Honolulu newspapers on microfilm going back through most of the 20th century. The films are still in accessible cabinets in the middle of the library’s main room. I looked up the date I was looking for and, with microfilm in hand, looked around for the readers. In the old days, and right up until the last time I went through this several years ago, you went to a microfilm reader, loaded the film, and then cranked the film through the reader until you got to the page you wanted, which would b projected onto a screen to be read. The readers used to be right alongside the file cabinets holding the microfilms. No more. I looked around the rest of the room and didn’t see any of the old readers.

So I approached the reference desk and asked where the readers were located. The librarian pointed a few feet from where we were standing. I glanced over and saw a computer. He could see that I was puzzled, so he walked me over and showed me the setup.

It is a new world, and I hadn’t recognized the new solution, which now involves a microfilm scanner attached to a PC. You load the film into the scanner, like before, but now it’s read and displayed digitally on the attached computer. You can then download the image onto a flash drive. I just took a picture of the article with my iPhone, rewound and replaced the microfilm, and was done.

Not quite as easy as searching an online newspaper collection, but certainly easier and better than it used to be.