news
Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism
03 December 2024

Digitizing the entire League of Nations archives : a "Great Experiment"

The Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism recently welcomed Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert as part of "The Kitchen Series".  This series provides a collaborative forum to engage with researchers exploring the digitalization of data and resources. 

The Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism welcomed Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert for a seminar on Nov 29th, 2024.  The series of Friday seminars provide a collaborative forum to engage with researchers exploring the digitalization of data and resources. You can find the abstract of this talk and further information about the speaker below: 

The Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD), a five-year, grant-funded project to digitise, preserve, and make accessible the League of Nations archives, completed its operations in October 2022. It was one of the first projects of its scale—scanning 14.2 million pages in total—to focus on the comprehensive digitisation of an intergovernmental organisation’s archives. The presentation provided researchers with an overview on the specifics of such a project, from its background, objectives, operations, assessments, and lessons learned. It also addressed the impact of the digital turn on archives services, as well as on the relationship with researchers, in the context of the development of digital humanities.

Blandine Blukacz-Louisfert presently heads the Institutional Memory Section at the United Nations Office at Geneva. She is responsible for the management of all aspects of the Organisation’s institutional memory life-cycle, from the management of UNOG’s current records to the preservation of the League of Nations and of the UN Geneva archives and their dissemination to the international community. Her responsibilities also include the United Nations Museum Geneva. She was the Director of the “Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project” (LONTAD), from 2017 to 2022.