Artifacts spanning the fingerprint repository’s century-long history were displayed for visitors, including vintage fingerprint cards, magnifiers, and colored pencils used by fingerprint examiners. A gallery illustrated the evolution from ink rollers and paper cards to today’s digital mobile devices.
The Digital Transformation
Tim Ferguson, acting assistant director of the CJIS Division, remarked, “This anniversary highlights the evolution of the biometrics program within the FBI. It’s amazing to me that we had the same type of fingerprint index from 1924 until 1999, with hundreds of file cabinets in a warehouse requiring manual identification and comparisons.”
Prior to the digital era, fingerprint examiners manually searched through filing cabinets to find matching fingerprints.
The implementation of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) in 1999 marked the beginning of digitized fingerprints at the FBI. Millions of paper cards were scanned and made accessible via computers, significantly enhancing the efficiency of fingerprint examinations.
