As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. A mere photograph can capture emotions and details that simple sentences would have a hard time describing. As such, it was my pleasure to have worked on the Raymonde Bonnefille photograph collection in my second year interning at the MMSH. My goal with this article is twofold: explain the Raymonde Bonnefille photograph collection and provide my feedback on HAL, the open source archive on which these photographs are now available.
In my first internship, I focused on what most people consider to be “traditional archives”. I would open a box filled to the brim with old newspaper articles and personal letters. Then I would proceed to write a short paragraph describing them before placing them back in the same box most likely never to be seen again. This year my source material will no longer be stored away in a closed room. My work, the photos of the “Raymonde Bonnefille collection”, are now available online on HAL for all to see. I have placed over 60 photos online taken in 1968, 1973, and 1974. Under each photo there is a description along with appropriate metadata. Mrs Bonnefille herself organised her photographs into five series, corresponding to the different missions, and documented the slides.1
Raymonde Bonnefille, a French geologist, was part of the 1974 expedition in the Hadar region of Ethiopia, an effort led by Tunisian-French Anthropologist Maurice Taieb and later Paleoanthropologist joined by Donald Johanson that contributed to the discovery of Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton that became one of the most important fossils for understanding early human evolution. Lucy’s discovery was important because it provided one of the most complete early hominin skeletons ever found, offering clear evidence of bipedalism millions of years before the emergence of modern humans. Bonnefille’s photographs, taken between 1968 and 1980 during her various trips to the region, include landscapes, portraits of the research team, images of campsites and vehicles, portraits of local Ethiopian communities, and several photographs of Lucy.
Having to adapt from newspaper clippings and party pamphlets to photographs was not the easiest transition. Articles often explain themselves and can be easily summarized. Meanwhile photographs leave much more to interpretation. Take for example the following 1973 photographs of the Hadar wilderness:


When writing my summary, do I focus on the colors? Do I focus on the rugged nature of the landscape? Do I dive into the specifics and mention the small shadows cast by the bushes in the foreground? Should I provide supplementary information about which camera Raymonde Bonnefile used and which airline she took to arrive in Hadar? All of these bits of information could be of use to someone trying to gain a better understanding of how Lucy was discovered. After all, I am writing in an academic setting and these photos may be accessed in the future by researchers.
I admit that I wrestled with these questions while I completed my internship. In some photographs you may come across dense and long descriptions focusing on the color of the sky and the shape of water currents. Others may only possess a quick description 1 sentence long. I believe both methods have their merits and I hope that those looking at the Raymonde Bonnefille collection will not focus so much on the description below the photograph but rather on the photograph itself.
Before discussing mediHAL, the open source platform I used to put the photos online, I would like to draw your attention to the photograph below:

It humanizes the researchers by showing them in an ordinary moment of rest and conversation rather than in the midst of scientific work. It also serves as a reminder that major discoveries are made by teams of people working, living, and problem-solving together in challenging conditions.
Now moving onto HAL. HAL is an open archive where authors can deposit scholarly documents from all academic fields. Founded by French quantum physicist Franck Laloë in 2001, it has become the most popular research archival site used by French academics. MédiHAL is its equivalent for storing media files, specifically images. Last but not least, MédiHAL makes it possible to catalogue photographs in the international ISO XMP format (Extensible Metadata Platform).
Advantages of MediHAL
- The website is free and open to all. Registration is for academics only. Access is free. In a time when many academic platforms require subscriptions or institutional logins, HAL’s openness allows students, researchers, or the general public to consult and download documents without restrictions, each use is specified by a licence.
- Users have the ability to search by keywords and by collections. This makes it easier to locate specific materials within large collections, allowing users to filter results efficiently and avoid sifting through unrelated documents.
- MediHAL isn’t just for the humanities and social sciences. Disciplines range from Chemical Sciences and Physics to Quantitative Finance and Cognitive Science. This multidisciplinary structure – linked to HAL – means that researchers from very different fields can deposit and access a wide variety of materials, and also supports multiple file types, which broadens the kinds of research outputs that can be shared. For example, a HAL search for “Raymonde Bonnefille” returns 114 results, including 74 images, 36 articles, 1 book, 2 book chapters, and 1 conference paper.
Despite its importance to research, HAL has many areas on which it can be improved for both those researching and those uploading.
Disadvantages of MediHAL
- I have systematically indicated the GPS coordinates of the locations where the photographs were taken. The platform does not offer map navigation, which would be a plus for searching and viewing photographs taken in the same place, within the same corpus or in different collections.
- As HAL is an academic platform, there is a validation process to ensure that the photograph is xithin the scientific domain, so HAL sometimes can take up to a week to move photos out of “awaiting moderation”. In the meantime, those who cannot log into HAL cannot view the photographs. And those that can, like myself, cannot make any edits to the photographs. It creates a roadblock for researchers and it should be resolved.
- During peak usage hours, the website becomes very slow and almost unusable.
Overall, while HAL is not a perfect software, it remains a reliable and accessible platform for making archival material available to the public. Its openness, ease of use, and multidisciplinary reach make it a valuable tool for researchers and institutions alike. Working on the Raymonde Bonnefille photograph collection showed me how meaningful it can be to place historical documents online, where they can be viewed, studied, and used rather than stored away. I hope that making these photographs accessible will encourage further interest in the Hadar expeditions and in the people who took part in them.
Crédits photographiques : image “à la une”…. Toutes les photographies sont issues du fonds Raymonde Bonnefille, documentées sur mediHAL par Traian Oglinzanu le 7 décembre 2025. Licence CC-BY-NC.
- The digitisation was funded by R. Bonnefille’s research laboratory, CEREGE [↩]
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Traian Oglinzanu (8 décembre 2025). Working with the Raymonde Bonnefille Collection and the HAL Open Archive. Archives de la recherche & Phonothèque de la MMSH. Consulté le 17 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15am8