New Project to Digitize US Government Microfiche

The Internet Archive, along with library partners, will be digitizing millions of pages of US government documents on microfiche and making them available for free:

"Microfiche cards, which contain miniaturized thumbnails of the publication’s pages, are starting to be digitized and matched to catalog records by the Internet Archive. Once in a digital format and preserved on archive.org, these documents will be searchable and downloadable by anyone with an Internet connection, since U.S. government publications are in the public domain."

"Seventy million pages on over one million microfiche cards have been contributed for scanning from Claremont Colleges, Evergreen State College, Stanford University, University of Alberta, University of California San Francisco, and the University of South Carolina (...)"

"Microfiche is not a format that can be easily read without using a machine in a library building. Many members of the public are not aware of the material available on microfiche so the potential for finding and using them is heightened once these documents are digitized. And as the information is shared with other federal depository libraries, there will be a ripple effect for researchers, academics, students, and the general public in gaining access."

The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco,  provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books. It has also saved historical versions of hundreds of billions of web pages in the Wayback Machine.