The "Father of Microphotography"

"Microphotography" you say? Yes, it does seem true at times that there really isn't anything new under the sun. We talk a lot in the library world nowadays about digital repositories, preserving the work of our student's theses, our faculty, as well as online journals etc. But this concern to preserve and easily disseminate information beyond the format of print has been around a long time. John Benjamin Dancer, pictured here, was an English scientist who began experimenting with photographing text in the 1840s, and by the 1850s was able to produce usable microphotographs of text to be viewed through a microscope, essentially the same concept as the microfilm readers once so common at college libraries.
We do still have some of those microfilm readers, and a high tech PC unit for those harder to view formats, and an extensive collection of microform material not yet available online, for example, older government documents and local newspapers.