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 Continuer la lecture de Working with the Raymonde Bonnefille Collection and the HAL Open Archive
- The digitisation was funded by R. Bonnefille’s research laboratory, CEREGE [↩]