“The Impact of Technology upon Medical History Research: The Past, the Problems, the Potential.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, vol. “Microfilm Collections of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States.” Collection Management, vol. HathiTrust Digital Library, /Record/001161347. “Full-Size Photocopying.” Rutgers University, 1960. Library Technology Program, American Library Association, 1966. Google Books, /books?id=qj5IAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA3-PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false. “Engineering News-record, Volume 69.” McGraw Hill Publications Company, 1913. Internet Archive, /details/sim_enr_69_25/mode/2up. “Engineering News : Vol 69 Iss 25.” McGraw Hill Publications Company, 1913. “Accessing Medieval Religious Manuscripts on the OCLC.” Journal of Religious & Theological Information, vol. “THE PHOTOSTAT IN BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AND RESEARCH WORK–A SYMPOSIUM.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. “THE PHOTOSTAT AND THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. “Photostats, or, The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.” The Collation, 23 July 2015. “PHOTOSTAT RECORDING IN LIBRARY WORK.” Aslib Proceedings, vol. Afterwards, the photostat was eclipsed by the release of automatic electrophotocopiers in 1959, and the advantages of microfilming soon made microfilms the preferred method of rare manuscript copying for most of the rest of the 20th century, finally marking the end of the photostat's wider usage.Īslin, E. It was only with the the release of the first modern-style photocopier in 1950 that the photostat's office use seriously ebbed. Despite this, the photostat still enjoyed use in office settings and manuscript copying, especially in the light of the threats to European libraries posed by WWII, where the destruction of libraries and their collections suddenly increased the value of photostatted manuscripts in American institutions. Microfilm reading machines in the 1930s and early 1940s competed for the photostat's niche in manuscript reproduction, as they fulfilled a very similar need with lower processing time and smaller storage requirements. The photostat was effective at reproducing rare documents, and was useful in office and documentary settings, but while it did not require specialist labor, it was a very large and cumbersome machine and its slow process eventually became untenable for mass-document copying. The British Library's photostat services were soon in high demand, as American scholars requested the use of their photostat machine to copy rare medieval and early modern manuscripts. The Oxford Bodleian Library installed a similar machine, with the same mechanical process, in 1907, though they used the term "rotograph," and the British Library and the Royal Library of Brussels had photostat machines by 1910. The first library to install a photostat in the United States was the Library of Congress in 1912, and the New York Public Library followed suite in December that year. In the United States, the term "photostat" eventually became a generic term for any sort of photographic reproduction output, process, or machine: indeed, the original patent did not have the term "photostat" at all, referring to the invention as a "Photographic Copying Device," though it was soon marketed as "The Photostat." For its first decade of existence, use of a Photostat machine was often simply referred to as "photographing" or "photo-reproduction."Ī 1913 advertisement for the photostat machine, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It entered the marketplace alongside a slew of similar technologies, such as the cameragraph and the rectigraph, which served similar purposes but had different mechanical processes. The photostat machine was commercially released sometime after 1905, though its patent was not filed until June 1913. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Accessibility.
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