Founded on 13 March 1937 as the American Documentation Institute (ADI) by Watson Davis, Atherton Seidell, and others, the organization was first concerned with microfilm and its role as a vehicle for the dissemination of information.
Claribel Cone, A Remarkable Woman, April 8, 1911, The Baltimore Evening Sun, interview available on microfilm at the library at Morgan State University, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and University of Maryland, College Park.
Dead Can Dance formed in Melbourne, Australia in August 1981 with Paul Erikson on bass guitar, Lisa Gerrard (ex-Microfilm) on vocals, Simon Monroe (Marching Girls) on drums and Brendan Perry (also of Marching Girls) on vocals and guitar.
It has an Extek 3441 microfilm duplicator, which duplicates at low speeds to prevent damage to Redox or Vinegar-Syndrome microfilm.
A first generation Sherpa van made an appearance in the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me which was driven by the villainous Jaws (Richard Kiel) on a journey through the Sahara Desert, with Bond (Roger Moore) and his partner Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) hiding in the back in their quest to recover a microfilm crucial to their mission.
The apparatus kept a safe apartment on West 57th Street, owned by Paula Levine, later part of a Soviet spy ring in Paris, and kept a photographic studio on Gay Street in Greenwich Village, where "Charlie," in actuality Leon Minster the brother-in-law of Vyacheslav Molotov, microfilmed the stolen documents.
The Local History and Genealogy Division includes works by local authors, Mobile histories, periodicals, Mobile newspapers on microfilm from 1819 to the present, city directories from 1837 onward, federal census records for most of the Southeastern United States, and the Mobile Historic Development Commission's survey of historic architecture in Mobile with 10,000 images stored and indexed on CD-ROM.
They are taken to the museum and the chief spy retrieves the microfilm from the other large dinosaur, a Diplodocus skeleton.
Prior to that, a similar system was deployed during the Franco-Prussian War which used carrier pigeons to send primitive microfilm strips across German lines, developed from French optician René Dagron's first patent granted for microfilm in 1859.