Canon Microfilm Machine

The Front Desk provides a microfilm scanner for patrons to access newspaper and journal articles that are located on microfilm/fiche. The Canon microfilm scanner works with Adobe Acrobat to create digital scans. You are welcome to use the machine yourself, ask the Front Desk for assistance, or submit a request for free digital reprint (processed within one business day). We encourage you to use the reprint request if you are overwhelmed by this process. You provide us all the information about the journal article and we will do our best to email you a digital PDF version within a business day.

Step-by-step guide

Turn on the microfilm machine with the Power switch near the bottom left of the machine.
Place the film cartridge on the metal bar holder located on the left side of the carrier.
Feed the film over the left-side black pulley, in between the glass plates and underneath the black pulley on the right side until the film reaches the clear wheel.
Rotate the brown dial on the bottom right of the machine to reel the film around the clear wheel. This may take some manual feeding and re-feeding of the film, but toggle the dial until the film catches and spins on its own.
Push the carrier back so that the lens is directly over the film and the light is shining through the view so the image appears on the screen. Toggle the brown knob again to find the correct page.
To bring the picture into focus, use the zoom lenses by twisting right and left on the arms of the grey bottom lens until you can clearly read the words on the screen.
To zoom in and out, twist the blue zoom lens’ arms, until the page is at the optimum view level.
If the page is crooked, straighten it by turning the top square-shaped lever until the edges line up with the corresponding edges on the screen.
To center the screen along the page, push or pull using the handle on the carrier until the page is in the center of the screen aligned between the letter-sized black corner markers on the screen. (Note: it is important you have zoomed out far enough that the entire screen is between the markers or else the entire page may not scan in).
BEFORE logging in to the computer, choose the correct paper color on the Microfilm Machine. To do this, select the paper color from the button on the far left to choose between white ink/black paper or black ink/white paper.
Once the screen shows the desired image, the screen needs to be scanned to a PDF. To capture a PDF of the Microfilm, open Adobe Acrobat Pro on the computer next to the microfilm. Go To [Create] then [PDF from Scanner] and choose [Grayscale Document].
Once the scan is finished a window will appear, select [scan is complete]. To scan another page, change the page on the Microfilm machine by moving the brown dial and select [scan more pages] and press [ok] to begin. Repeat until the full length of the document is scanned in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
To remove microfilm, pull the carrier back out from underneath the lens. Turn the brown knob to the left to reverse out of the microfilm until it is completely rolled around its original holder. Turn off the machine and notify the patron that the document is ready. Unless otherwise told, send the document as an attachment to the recipient’s SPU e-mail account.

Questions or Assistance?

Contact the Library Front Desk which is located on the Main Level of the Ames Library at Seattle Pacific University.

206-281-2228 | circ@spu.edu | spu.edu/library

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