ARPC begins elimination of microfilm

  • Published
  • By By Tech. Sgt. Rob Hazelett
  • Air Reserve Personnel Center Public Affairs
BUCKLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. --  The microfilm era will come to an end at the Air Reserve Personnel Center once the last images are converted to an electronic format and uploaded to the Automated Records Management System beginning Aug. 1, 2012, on Buckley Air Force Base, Colo.

More than 13 million images have been transferred to hard drives, which are backed up with DVDs, in preparation for the microfiche destruction by Aug. 31.

"We feel very confident that when the microfiche was placed on hard drives everything that existed on microfiche and turned over for conversion has been captured. The conversion process included quality control of the process and final product," said Jackie Bing, sustainment division chief Total Force Service Center - Denver.

"Additionally, two separate contractors measured the number of images ARPC had on microfiche and their totals were within the range of the center's estimated 14 million images. Therefore, we knew duplicates would be found to account for any differences in totals," Bing added.

Air Force approval for microfilming Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard records was granted in June 1971. The center began using microfiche when the first batches of ARPC records were pulled from files for microfilming June 24, 1974.

The project was completed for the Reserves in 1977 and ANG records were completed March 1978.

Several ARPC employees got their start in the microfilm branch, including Mark Nelson, ARPC historian, who served as a military personnel technician at the time.

"My first job at ARPC in 1993 was working in the so-called 'inner room' in the mounting unit. Our job was to cut the images off a long roll and mount them on the correct fiche," Nelson said. "Each servicemember's mylar sheet had a different letter: C for correspondence, M for medical, and so on. A member's entire set of microfiche was called a 'fiche family.' Now that everything is digitized, we can store and recall all that data from our desks."

With the destruction of the microfilm, the progress is evident.

"A whole process of loaning, retrieving and maintaining microfiche has been eliminated. It's exciting to see the progress the center continually makes in this digital age to better serve the customer and to be a part of helping it happen," Bing said.