WHY ANALOGUE?
No durable alternatives
The microfilm has proven to be a safe and migration-free archival medium for long-term preservation for more than five decades. Microfilm has a life expectancy of up to 500 hundred years and is human-readable, e.g. by an optical loupe or a scanner, and hence, is not dependant on complex decoding algorithms.
The unbeatable advantages of analogue archiving on microfilm have been addressed in international publications and governmental reports (see literature below).
Literature
Preserving Records on Microfilm. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), USA.
http://www.archives.gov/preservation/formats/microfilming.html
Digital images for eternity: Color microfilm as archival medium. By Cédric Normand et al., Proceedings of SPIE, Color Imaging XII: Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications, 649307 (2007).
http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1298582
Ilford Micrographic Film. By Rita Hofmann and Jean-Noel Gex, DGPh Symposium, Photokina (2008).
http://www.dgph.de/content/sektionen/wissenschaft_technik/symposium08/Hofmann_Gex-Vortrag.pdf
Image Storage and Permanence Considerations in the Long-Term Preservation of Photographic Images – Update 2010. By Joseph E. LaBarca, Preservation and Conservation Issues in Digital Printing and Digital Photography, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 231 (2010).
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/231/1/012008/pdf
Mikroverfilmung im Kulturgüterschutz, Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz BABS, Fachbereich Kulturgüterschutz KGS, Bern 2009.
Der Mikrofilm als Langzeit-Speichermedium. Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK) der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Referat III.1, Kulturgutschutz.
Geschichte in Dosen. Von Joachim Schüring, Abenteuer Archäologie, S. 50-53 (2005).
