Page 53 - Bulletin, Vol.82 No.3, October 2023

organisation was the first to propose a new approach based on collective bargaining as
a means of resolving conflicts. PELICHET's expertise supported the move from the
League of Nations to the United Nations Organisation. With 63 member countries, the
League of Nations has, over its 27 years of existence, enabled numerous international
exchanges and negotiations to take place between different countries and in different
languages.

The archives from this period, classified in the archives of the United Nations Library,
comprising more than 120,000 official documents, 27,000 maps and plans, 9,000
photographs, almost 3 linear kilometres and a total of 500,000 documentary units, can
now be consulted by anyone, and more than a million consultations have already been
recorded.

Inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register The exceptional nature of this
abundant documentation has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Because of the unique nature of these archives, the United Nations Office at Geneva
decided in 2017 to preserve them digitally so that they could then be made available to
the general public on the Internet.

The LONTAD (Total Access To the League Of the Nations Archives) project was then
launched with Colin Wells as project leader.

The project involved 30 people divided into different areas of expertise: the first area
prepared the archives (decontamination and consolidation of documents, repackaging
in neutral boxes) for delivery to the selected heritage digitisation service provider,
Arkhênum. Once the digitisation and data enhancement phase had been completed, the
digital images were then transferred to the last department, which was responsible for
quality control of the images, their description and indexing on the online platform.

A dedicated digitisation workshop set up at the United Nations Given the scale of the
project, the United Nations Office at Geneva decided to digitise its historical archives in-
house in order to optimise turnaround times and facilitate exchanges between the
various departments. Another major decision was to entrust the digitisation of its
heritage to a service provider specialising in this field.
An international call for tenders was launched at the end of 2017. 18 service providers
offered their services for this unusual project. In the end, Arkhênum, in association with
the PELICHET group, won the tender.

A fully autonomous digitisation workshop was set up on the UN premises in Geneva to
work in synergy with the UN's two other centres of expertise. In addition to this module,
which was up and running in just 2 months, there is a complete production workshop
comprising 7 heritage scanners accompanied by their software suites, storage and
backup systems. Over the 4 years of digitisation, 220 terabytes of data were generated,
totalling 14.2 million digital images.

In order to carry out this digitisation project, which was unprecedented in terms of the
volume involved, Arkhênum assigned 6 people to the project on a full-time basis for the
duration of the contract. This independent workshop was managed by Lisa Le Goff,

AAFI-AFICS BULLETIN, Vol. 82 No.2, 2023-10 51

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