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

Talent Story No. 2

“We formed really close relationships on this assignment”

After joining Arkhênum in 2015 as part of an end-of-study internship, Lisa Le Goff has never left! And with good reason, too: she’s at home here and has climbed up the ladder, taking on responsibilities she dreamed of as an international project manager.

Lisa has a preparatory class training from Chartes school in heritage conservation together with a vocational master’s degree in digital publishing and heritage. She soon understood that it was essential nowadays to combine these two disciplines. It follows that Arkhênum was the perfect place for her to kick off her career.

A first job in Paris

Lisa was hired first in July 2015 as a control and processing operator for four months. She soon honed her skills and was appointed junior project manager until April 2018. At the same time, the United Nations hired Arkhênum to digitise the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva, and the company appointed Lisa project manager for this vital work.

The UN: an amazing digitisation project

“This project was extraordinary in many ways: not just in terms of the volume of documents that had to be processed but also because of how long it lasted and its international dimension – not to mention the number of people who were involved,” explains Lisa. For four-and-a-half years, Lisa and her team of five operators were embedded in the group of 30 people (including Arkhênum employees and UN staff) working on digitising and promoting 14 million pages. The project’s aim was two-fold: to preserve the physical collection in the best possible condition and to give researchers and the general public around the world the opportunity to consult the unpublished archives on the internet.

“The project clearly enabled the company and me to step up a size,” admits Lisa. “Every document we processed is a little piece of history that was added to the broader history we already know.” Lisa turns to the example of a felt flower – a poppy – that she discovered between two sheets of scrap paper: it was, she explains, a symbol of gratitude to British soldiers during the Great War. And then there was the letter she found from a young woman asking for news about her mother, who she was unable to get in touch with in 1933 in Warsaw. “The passage of time and historical awareness add real value to these unique documents”, concludes Lisa. “Having the chance to get up close to them is really stimulating”.

An international milestone

As a result of this mission, Lisa was put in charge of the on-site workshop, monitoring the quality of the final images and processing, and delivering them to the client as well as leading the reporting meetings. She was the key point of contact for the UN teams and Arkhênum’s on-site representative. All these duties have given Lisa confidence and an appetite for international work. She enjoys operating in environments where English is spoken, and with people from diverse backgrounds who have very different views about digitisation and archives. “We formed really close relationships on this assignment,” adds Lisa.

In Lisa’s eyes, Arkhênum really does reveal the past, especially when clients with archive collections don’t know all the details about them. For instance, on a project to restore the blueprints of the University of Cape Town, the digitisation process revealed previously-invisible information on the paper plans. As Lisa points out, “Our profession uncovers some nice surprises”.

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

Every page turned is an archived story

Arkhênum is celebrating its 25th anniversary!

In 2024 Arkhênum marks 25 years dedicated to preserving and promoting documentary heritage. It is a source of genuine satisfaction and an honour to be able to celebrate this long life and the recognition of the manual and technical expertise of our devoted staff. Thank you to the organisations we have worked with for their trust over all these years… and the years to come!

Arkhênum invites you to learn (more) about its history in 2024

To celebrate this anniversary, we have delved into our archives to take a (new) look at the key chapters in our history or the tales from history. We have “exhumed” a series of newspaper articles, photographs and video reports that we’re going to share with you.

The next events in the history of Arkhênum

It goes without saying that in the 25 years we have been in business, our digitisation methods have evolved in line with technology, customer expectations and the challenges encountered in the field: in situ scanning, manual indexing, 360° scanning, etc.

In 2011, as a logical continuation of our digitisation work, Arkhênum began putting digitised collections online to cater to the needs and expectations of various organisations and the French Ministry of Culture.

In 2016 Arkhênum introduced an archivist and historian division to assist not just private but also public institutions.

As it’s clear to see, there’s no shortage of topics to discuss! We will tell you about projects that have bowled us over (the Avranches manuscripts) or seized us with emotion (training Malian operators in how to digitise Timbuktu manuscripts) – as well as projects that have challenged us (digitising the  League of Nations Archives in Geneva).

Preserve your heritage with Arkhênum. Contact us now!

Every page turned is an archived story

Arkhênum brings its heritage expertise to Ethiopia

Experts from Arkhênum, a MEMORIST company, have just finished work on the Sustainable Lalibela project in Ethiopia. Led by the CNRS and executed by the French Center for Ethiopian Studies, this project formed part of a Franco-Ethiopian plan to restore, conserve and enhance the Lalibela archaeological site.

Sustainable Lalibela: 5 areas of intervention

The project’s primary objective was to preserve and enhance the site. As such, it included a major archaeological component, but there was also a heritage preservation component that included the creation of a digital heritage resource centre. It was for this component that Arkhênum’s expertise was required. 

Establishing an autonomous heritage digitisation workshop and training local staff to manage the digitisation process was an important step in the preservation of Lalibela’s documentary collections. There are 200 manuscripts preserved in the 11 churches, but they are not accessible to the public.

Setting up a digitisation workshop

The Arkhênum team first conducted an audit to define the requirements of the digitisation workshop to be set up on site: types of scanners, digitisation accessories, software, etc. 

The various components were then delivered to the Lalibela site which is located in the heart of the Ethiopian highlands, 400km from the capital Addis Ababa. 

Project manager Lisa then set up the digitisation workshop in the presence of the local trainees.

2 weeks of intensive training

The training brought together 15 participants made up of local clergy, staff from the Lalibela cultural centre and the Lalibela museum. 

Conducted in English and Amharic, it equipped the learners with the skills to ensure that the site’s preservation continues long after the Arkhênum team has returned to France.

The theoretical training covered:

• How to complete an inventory file after digitisation
• How to analyse a collection for digitisation (status report, feasibility)
• The practice of digitisation and points of vigilance
• The generation of deliverables (file layout and organisation)
• Metadata management

Our Project Manager Lisa reflects on this experience.

Every page turned is an archived story