Ever wonder how government documents, once locked away on tiny sheets of microfiche, become searchable and accessible online? Now you can see it happen in real time.

Today, the Internet Archive has launched a livestream from our microfiche scanning center(https://www.youtube.com/live/aPg2V5RVh7U), offering a behind-the-scenes look at the meticulous work powering Democracy’s Library—a global initiative to make government publications freely available to the public.

“This livestream shines a light on the unsung work of preserving the public record, and the critical infrastructure that makes democracy searchable,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “Transparency can’t be passive—it must be built, maintained, and seen. That’s what this livestream is all about.”

Watch the livestream now:

What You’ll See

The livestream features five active microfiche digitization stations, with a close-up view of one in action. Operators feed microfiche cards beneath a high-resolution camera, which captures multiple detailed images of each sheet. Software stitches these images together, after which other team members use automated tools to identify and crop up to 100 individual pages per card.

Each page is then processed, made fully text-searchable, and added to the Internet Archive’s public collections—completed with metadata—so that researchers, journalists, and the general public can explore and download them freely through Democracy’s Library.

 Live activity occurs Monday–Friday, 7:30am-3:30pm U.S. Pacific Time (GMT+8)—except U.S. holidays—with a second shift coming soon.

What Is Microfiche?

Microfiche is a flat sheet of film that holds dozens—sometimes hundreds—of miniaturized document images. It’s been a common format for archiving newspapers, court documents, government records, and more since the 20th century.

Why Is Microfiche Digitization Important?

“Materials on microfiche are an important part of our country’s history, but right now they are often only available online from expensive databases. We are excited that this project will digitize court documents from our collection and make them freely available to everyone,” said Leslie Street, Director of the Wolf Law Library of William and Mary College.

“Thousands of documents and reports from across the federal government were distributed in microfiche to Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries around the country from 1970 – 2022. While important for space-saving and preservation, microfiche has long been problematic for public access. So this digitization work of Democracy’s Library is incredibly important and will unlock free access to this essential historic public domain corpus to readers and researchers around the world!” noted James R. Jacobs, US government information librarian and co-author of the recently published book, Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future.

About Democracy’s Library

Democracy’s Library is the Internet Archive’s ambitious project to collect, digitize, and provide free public access to the world’s government publications. From environmental impact reports to court decisions, these materials are essential for accountability, scholarship, and civic engagement.

The microfiche collections that will be digitized in this process include US GPO documents, Canadian government documents, US court documents, and UN publications. We are always looking for more collections to be donated.

Meet the People Behind the Work

From left: Internet Archive’s digital librarian, Brewster Kahle, with microfiche scanning operators Dylan, Louis, Elijah, Avery, and Fernando.

This digitization livestream was brought to life by Sophia Tung, appmaker & designer behind the viral robotaxi depot livestream on YouTube.

The digitization is overseen by scanning operators who are trained to handle physical library materials and digitization equipment.

Thanks also to Internet Archive staff who assisted this project, including CR Saikley, Merlijn Wajer, Brewster Kahle, Derek Fukumori, Jude Coelho, Anastasiya Smith, Jonathan Bloom, Andrea Mills, Richard Greydanus, Louis Brizuela, Carla Igot Bordador, and Ria Gargoles.

Thanks to Our Partners

Thank you to Wolf Law Library at the William & Mary Law School, University of Alberta, and Free Law Project for donating microfiche and helping advise this project.

If your library has microfiche or other materials to donate to the Internet Archive, please learn more about donating materials for preservation and digitization.

Support the Work

Preserving and digitizing these fragile, analog records is resource-intensive—and deeply worthwhile. Donate today to support the Internet Archive and Democracy’s Library.