Talent Story No. 6

“Sharing Arkhênum’s know-how and bringing culture to light”

Laurent Bidet is a consultant in digitisation and heritage promotion, and sharing is in his DNA. Laurent joined Arkhênum in 2017 and today channels the company’s expertise to international clients and the teams working in the Mobilitas Group (Arkhênum’s parent company). His number-one priority is to preserve and showcase the heritage of Africa. “I coordinate every facet of the company’s expertise with this goal in mind,” he explains. “Our mission is to help clients reveal the heritage and history contained in their archives, and to work alongside them to create tools that raise cultural awareness.”

And with good reason: before embarking on the Arkhênum adventure, Laurent worked as an IT sales engineer and as a production manager in archive digitisation. “In 2017, Laurent Onaïnty, Arkhênum’s managing director, was keen to scale up his team to carry out heritage digitisation projects in Africa,” he explains. For Laurent Bidet, joining Arkhênum was an opportunity to “take things up a notch” in line with the company’s goals. This international expansion was made possible thanks to Arkhênum’s own resources and the support of the Mobilitas Group.

Sharing expertise: a real vocation

Laurent’s new role has seen him travel to numerous countries in Africa, where he has learnt about other cultures. Since 2017, Laurent has undertaken projects in, amongst other places, Dakar, and delivered training courses in several countries on the continent. He believes he has “sown seeds in the various African countries I’ve visited where time is perceived differently than in Europe”.

Giving people back the keys to their history

Laurent explains that digital technology can be used to explore, analyse and process information more effectively.

“Heritage digitisation is vital to reveal knowledge and safeguard world heritage. An archive that is fragile and hard to access (except for a privileged few) can quickly and easily be made available to everyone once it has been digitised.”

Arkhênum establishes itself as an international expert

Laurent saw his role expand in 2020 to include the technical analysis of digitisation tenders in Germany, a new market for Arkhênum. “My function – which is mainly technical – means I review tenders, sound the alarm about potential risks, and assess what we can do to bring a project to a successful completion.” It’s an approach that has proved to be a success: two major projects have recently started in Berlin and Leipzig, with Laurent acting as a digitisation consultant expert.

What motivates Laurent in his day-to-day work?

Every page turned is an archived story

Talent Story No. 5

“I have the privilege of photographing documents that have never been handled in the 21^st century”

Turning a hobby into a job

Yes, Stéphanie Cousin has turned her passion into her profession! The professional photographer began her career snapping photos in specialist studios before moving to a photo service company where she was team manager for a decade or so.

In 2017, however, on the look-out for new opportunities, Stéphanie responded to an Arkhênum advertisement for a photographer.

Stéphanie joined the book digitisation department before quickly moving to the iconography workshop, where she digitised “iconographic documents that need to be in a very high resolution”, including slides, negatives, postcards and even glass plates. “Working with images has always been a source of inspiration to me and something I’ve found thrilling,” she says.

“A role that guarantees quality”

When handling media, especially negatives, Stéphanie must be extremely vigilant. It’s her responsibility to spot the slightest error or missing document and report the information to her manager who then informs the client.

Stéphanie enjoys adding variety to her work, and she also helps optimise the files resulting from the digitisation process.

“We go back over the framing and colours, upgrading the image to eliminate any damage that has accrued over time,” she explains. “Our goal never changes: to promote every item in a collection as much as  possible.”

Recently, as part of a project for the Fondation des Gueules Cassées (the Foundation of Broken Faces), Stéphanie helped optimise the digital images of glass plates from the First World War. “Revealing the facial injuries – the literal broken faces – of the war veterans before and after surgery was particularly moving,” confesses Stéphanie, for whom Arkhênum’s new slogan, Revealing the Past has particular meaning. “In photography, the developer or developing solution is the product that reveals the image.”

What motivates Stéphanie in her day-to-day work?

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Talent Story No. 4

“Working towards something that is meaningful”

End-to-end support across the entire promotional chain

“This service, which ranges from auditing collections to exhibiting them online, means we can give our clients comprehensive solutions that are turnkey,” explains Emmanuel.

These digital libraries are home to all types of digitised media: newspapers from yesteryear, manuscripts, postcards, audiovisual collections, objects, and even 3D representations of historical monuments. “A digital library allows us to highlight the work we do with our clients. We can also easily configure who will have access: the general public or a restricted audience of researchers or employees.”

“Working on something meaningful”

Emmanuel sees his expanded role as a continuation of his career. After working extensively in new technology, he became an expert in websites and multimedia more generally. “And I’ve always worked in education or tourism,” he explains. As such, when he joined the Arkhênum adventure in 2013 it was simply the logical next step.

Making heritage visible

What motivates Emmanuel in his day-to-day work?

Every page turned is an archived story

Making a success of your heritage digitisation project

What does your digitisation project hope to achieve?

We need to know how you plan to use your documents in the future so we can give you the best advice about which digitisation options you should choose. Our recommendations will be different depending on whether your digitisation project is intended for use on the web (a digital library), will be printed as a heritage book or will take the form of large format labels for a physical exhibition.

Your answers to these questions will affect the advice we give you not just about the digitisation itself but also about the related metadata used to enrich the digital images.

The right questions to ask yourself

• Is a standardised inventory available in Excel format?
• Do your documents have classification numbers?
• What are the sizes of the documents, and what is their state of conservation?
• What is the opening angle of your paper documents (180°, 120°, 90°)?
• What is the required scanning resolution (300 dpi, 400 dpi, 600 dpi, etc.)?
• Are there written texts buried in the binding?
• What are the documents packaged in (sleeves, boxes, etc.) for iconographic documents?
• What are the expected file formats and delivery media?
• Is the work to be carried out at the service provider or on your premises?

Scanners and related accessories

Our experts will be able to give you the best advice once they factor in how you intend to use the images from the campaign and the information contained in the inventory.

What metadata is best for your images?

Your documents may undergo special processing to embed metadata that will be vital for their use in the future.

• Optical character recognition (OCR) applied to printed documents
• Metadata embedded into the images (IPTC, Dublin Core, etc.)
• Creating tables of contents
• Article segmentation
• Manual indexing of handwritten fields
• DTP post-processing (sticking pieces together, etc.)

Image delivery formats

Arkhênum will digitise all your documents whether they are printed or handwritten books, old or recent newspapers, various types of registers or maps and technical plans (architecture, land register, etc.), posters, every type of iconographic document and even objects.

We will deliver your digital images in the most suitable formats for your project: TIFF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, simple PDF or with hidden text, TXT, E-pub as well as HTML 5, .obj for 360° or 3D objects.

Ready to digitise your heritage collections? Contact our experts for a free consultation and ensure your documents are preserved for future generations. Get in touch now!

Every page turned is an archived story

Talent Story No. 3

“Arkhênum’s work helps preserve the bonds of history and our society today.”

Heritage as a driving force in daily life

Simon also shares this commitment and thirst for heritage and archives with his colleagues in the digitisation team, who he discusses and debates with as the documents are processed and articles discovered.

“Revealing genuine moments from history to the world”

Being in daily contact with old, sometimes unpublished, documents means Simon can discover great swathes of history. “The documents we have access to are the glue that holds today’s society and history together,” he says. “Through our work at Arkhênum, we help to digitally preserve all the archives that make us who we are today.”

Arkhênum’s new rallying cry, Revealing the Past, is in perfect accord with the company’s mission: to reveal crucial moments from history for the world to see; and to give the public access to documents that wouldn’t be available to them without digital technology.

What motivates Simon in his day-to-day work?

Every page turned is an archived story