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best possible condition and to give researchers and the general public around the world the opportunity to consult the unpublished archives on the internet.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