View Single Post
  #17  
Old 13th February 2018, 11:19
Laurent Rizzotti Laurent Rizzotti is offline
Alter Hase
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Paris, France
Posts: 2,917
Laurent Rizzotti is on a distinguished road
Re: what a slimey person

When I did my national service in 1995-1996 in the French Army archives (SHA), most of the officers files of the Napoleon era had disappeared, for the reason that they were signed by Napoleon himself and so were sought at by collectioners.

Now, when you go to these archives, security is much more reinforced, but too late for many documents.

My own opinion is that Internet is a huge booster for any historical research, and numerisation of archives is the best way to make them usable to many, especially abroad (and it is always a good thing to check both sides archives for WWII history, when possible), but also to protect them from theft or destruction (by reducing manual handling, or creating a "save" in case of fire).

Sadly French archives is decade late for numerisation. A pity because when I did my service 23 years ago I worked on such a project, but it was a total failure, due to a very bad choice of documents to be scanned: they were larger to the available scan, so we had to scan the four corners, then assemble them into one file, and then we were supposed to run a software on the image that will recognize the text. Sadly it was fully hand written on a dark paper with many vertical and horizontal lines, and the percentage of correct text was close to nil. Actually we were far faster by copying ourselves the text (that was perfectly readable for human eyes). But we had to follow orders and so use the software (and then correct 99% of the result manually). Last to be said, if the documents were in such a good state, it was because "nobody was ever asking to read them", so it was judged OK to take them out the archives to lend them to our service for months. Effectively, nobody ever asked for it in the 8 months I was there.
Reply With Quote