Community & Business
29 July, 2026
Snippets from Our Past: Nyngan Museum News
This edition's Snippets from Our Past examines the Nyngan Museum's old microfilm reader.
By Leonie Montgomery, Nyngan Museum coordinator
Sorry about the Sneak Peek photo, but I didn’t want to make it too easy for you. This week we are looking at the Nyngan Museum’s old microfilm reader.
Prior to the age of digitisation, microfilm was used to store large quantities of printed material.
Although many records are now digitised, analogue microfilm is still essential for the storage and retrieval of many records.
Wikipedia reports that microform is a “scaled-down reproduction of a document made for the purposes of transmission, storage, reading and printing.
There are four formats of microform; microfilm which is reels ( this is what we have at the museum), microfiche which is flat sheets, micro-opaques are cards and aperture cards which are punched cards with a cut-out into which a slip of microfilm is mounted.”
Surprisingly the first microphotographs were produced in 1839. In 1851 astronomer James Glaisher suggested using the technique to preserve documents.
Once the microform is made, libraries are able to access the collection without putting the rare, fragile or valuable originals at risk of damage or theft.
When you see some of the old paper documents we have at the Museum it is understandable that handling these is not possible without causing damage.
It also allows large volumes of information to be stored with minimum storage space requirements, and copied images allow the information to be accessible to a number of organisations around the world. Remember, this is all before computers and the internet.
‘Museum of Obsolete Media’ says that following its introduction, micro-photography soon saw military use in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 as a means of allowing pigeons to carry dispatches in compressed form.
Apparently the first transparent plastic roll firms were introduced in 1889.
The first commercial use of the technology was when George McCarthy took out a patent in 1925 for his Checkograph machine, designed to make micrographic copies of cancelled cheques.
In 1929, the Eastman Kodak Company bought McCarthy’s invention and began marketing cheque microfilming devices under its recordak division.
We are very fortunate at the Museum to house the ARK microfilm collection. According to ‘Museums of History NSW’, ARK is held by 38 community access points across NSW. ARK - Archives Resources Kit, consists of microfilm copies of the most popular and heavily used colonial records including convict arrivals, assisted immigrants, births, deaths and marriages, publicans’ licences, electoral rolls, naturalisation, and the wide range of functions of the Colonial Secretary (1788 – 1825).
The kits were distributed across NSW in 2007. There are 604 reels of microfilm in the collection. Originally placed in Nyngan Library, it is now housed at the Museum, where it is used by volunteers and also the public.
Last year a couple of young guys spent a day perusing the records. It is interesting that the online list of access points includes Bourke, Cobar and Dubbo, but not Nyngan.
This Northwest Microfilm 2020 is apparently the updated reader from when the Museum first inherited ARK from the library. It works like an inverted overhead projector. The microfilm is loaded at the top and the image is projected down to the white bench.
Like an overhead, the projected image is enlarged making it big enough to read. The machine is still in working order, but is no longer used.
Around 15 years ago a reader that links to a computer was purchased. Although you still have to scroll through and read each page, as the microfilm is still not digital, it is much easier to copy pages into a file and print information.
Apart from ARK, the museum also has microfilm copies of the Nyngan Observer newspaper from the 1890s up to around the 1970s. (I did not think to look up the exact dates). Anna Corby spends many a joyous hour scanning old newspapers for vital information about our local past.
The job is very time-consuming and quite hard on the eyes, but such a thrill when you do find a tidbit of information. A couple of years ago the museum was involved in a program with the high school, and some of the students spent time with Anna learning how to use the microfilm reader. She had some very exciting news articles lined up to inspire the student about the pleasure of delving into the past.
If you have perused a copy of ‘Nyngan on the Bogan’, you would see many images from the old newspapers, especially advertisements from the local businesses.
For many years, the front page of the Nyngan Observer was just advertisements. This indicates the important of this information to people who were isolated and not always able to visit the shops, to see what was available.
At the museum we get many requests for information about relatives who once resided in Nyngan.
Anna and Jean Lovett follow up these where possible, but it is not as easy as it seems on those TV shows where people are taken to a book and see their relatives names.
I had one person seeking information about their grandfather. They were able to give me fairly accurate dates, and with a bit of searching and reading many pages I was able to find the two sentence funeral notice on the microfilm. They were so grateful for this little link to their relative from the past.