Modern Technology

 

Book of sermons by the Rev. Salmon Cowles

I'm not much of a shopper so when my wife and children head for the city to shop, I generally stay home. But recently, I discovered that my 4th great grandfather had a folder of items located in the State Historical Building and so I went along with my wife who graciously dropped me off at the Historical Building while she went shopping. Above is a book of sermons written by my fourth great grandfather, the first Presbyterian minister in Iowa territory. Pretty neat.

But this post isn't about that. After perusing the book of sermons and taking a few pictures of interesting pages, I had more time to kill before my wife was done shopping. I headed back to the rows of microfilmed newspapers of years gone by and found a drawer that contained microfilmed newspaper reels from my home town. I never even knew it was big enough to merit a newspaper. So I grabbed a reel of the oldest newspaper on file, 1897, and headed for the old microfilm reading machines in the corner. They weren't there anymore.

Previously there had been a couple rows of around a dozen machines in the corner with two of them having a printer attached. To use the printer, you had to reserve the machine in advance and come armed with a roll of quarters as each copy made cost a quarter. Both times I have used one, I have lucked out and had been there when one was available (not reserved ahead of time). 

As I was heading back to the receptionist area to inquire where the microfilm readers were located, I noticed a row of new computers set up in the "reading room" with some reel to reel attachments that made them look like microfilm readers. I inspected them and realized that is exactly what they were. Within 15 minutes, and after following instructions on the nearby laminated guide, I was able to get my microfilm loaded and was reading a newspaper from my hometown printed in 1897!

Along the way, I learned that now I could digitally "clip" anything I wanted from the newspaper, drop it into an email and send it to myself, all free of charge. In fact, once I figured things out, I could clip and email an article in less than 30 seconds. Before with the hold readers, it required fiddling with all sorts of knobs to focus and center up the image, printing a copy or two to get a legible copy, taking that copy home and scanning it to digitize it and then filing it away in my electronic folders. 

Before I knew it, a couple hours had passed and my wife was done shopping and wanting to go home. Since we both found this very agreeable, I'm not grumpy at being dragged to yet another store full of things I don't want, and she gets company on the ride to and from the city without having to drag a grumpy person pressuring her to shop faster, I think I might be doing more of this in the future. I think I'll start making a list of newspapers, only found on microfilm, that I want to read just to have ready for the next shopping trip.