Society of American Archivist Annual Meeting
Archive Once, Then Actually Be Done: Visit NanoFiche at Booth 612, SAA Archives*Records 2026
NanoFiche® · Archive Once • No Migration • No Maintenance • Analog • Noble Metal • No Energy Costs
The Society of American Archivists’ 90th Annual Meeting, Archives*Records 2026, lands at the Hyatt Regency New Orleans July 29 – August 1, and we’ll be there. Stop by Booth 612 to see under a microscope, with your own eyes a preservation medium that never goes back on your to-do list.
The problem every archivist knows by heart
Every preservation medium you use today makes your records a recurring chore. Digital collections must be powered, cooled, secured, monitored for data rot and cyber threats, and migrated to new formats and hardware every 5-10 years forever. Microfiche must be kept below 70°F and 40% relative humidity, inspected for redox and mold, and re-duplicated as readers and film stock quietly disappear from the supply chain.
NanoFiche® takes a different path: your records are nano-engraved into solid nickel, and then you are simply done. No migration. No vault. No maintenance. No energy costs. Readable with any microscope for thousands of years.
The math over 50 years
For one million pages preserved over 50 years, our planning estimates in 2026 dollars look like this:
| Cost category | Digital / Data Center | Traditional Microfiche | NanoFiche |
| Initial setup | ~$30K | ~$180K | ~$250K |
| Annual maintenance | ~$1.5M | ~$300K | under $5K |
| Electricity / HVAC | ~$500K | ~$150K | $0 |
| Migration / refresh | ~$600K | ~$90K | $0 |
| Access equipment | ~$150K | ~$60K | ~$5K |
| 50-year total | $3.0M+ | ~$780K | ~$260K |
Digital’s low buy-in becomes a permanent liability: five to ten full migrations in 50 years. Microfiche survives only as long as its vault conditions do. NanoFiche costs more on day one and almost nothing ever again. And every engraving includes a digital access copy; recover anytime by scanning the plate, with AI transcription to searchable PDF.
Proven where permanence is the mandate
This isn’t a lab concept. At the booth you can view 1919 diary pages from the Allen County Public Library’s Warfield collection, engraved on a nickel NanoFiche disc and read back at 200× on an ordinary microscope, no software, no file format, no power. The same technology carried the Arch Mission Foundation’s 30-million-page Lunar Library to the Moon (six lunar missions and counting) and preserves archives at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, the National Library of Israel, the Long Now Rosetta Project, and the America 250 Time Vault. It’s licensed by Microsoft, Technicolor, Arch Mission, the Long Now Foundation, and more.
It’s a natural fit for historical documents, mandated analog records, county land and vital records, wills, court cases, engineering drawings, even nuclear waste documentation. Fire, flood, and EMP resistant.
Something personal, too
You spend your career making other people’s records permanent. This one is yours. We’ll also be showing the NanoFiche Personal Archive – coin-sized medallions carrying a family history, a lifetime of photographs, a parent’s letters, or a complete sacred text, engraved word for word in archival metal. The entire King James Bible, 788,258 words in 31,102 verses, fits on a medallion the size of a dime, wearable or sealed in a fireproof stainless steel capsule.
See it at Booth 612
Bring your skepticism and look through the microscope. We’ll walk you through the workflow image your documents (analog or born-digital), engrave at nanoscale on solid nickel, place on any shelf, done and talk through what it would cost for your holdings.
Archives*Records 2026 · Hyatt Regency New Orleans · July 29 – August 1 · Booth 612