UNGeneva Archives platform

Good morning.

Welcome to this press conference that we are organising on the subject of enabling the history of multilateralism, the launch of the UN Archives Geneva Platform.

Today we have the great honour and pleasure to have with us the Director General of the UN Office at Geneva, Mrs Tatiana Bello Vaya with her on her right, Francesco Pisano, who is the Director of the UN Library and Archives of the of Geneva, and Brendan Blucatz was the Chief of the Institutional Memory Section.

So we will have brief introductory remarks by our three panellists and then we will open the floor to question and answer.

And I'd like to start with the Director General.

You have the floor man.

Thank you, Alessandra.

As Alessandra said today, we're here to present you the platform, because for several years we've been talking about the project, we've been talking about the project of digitising the whole you, the whole library of League of Nations.

But now we're speaking about the result of this process, about the platform which have been created as a result of digitising 15,000,000 pages.

And as a result of this project, we have unlimited access online to the institutional memory of League of Nations.

That I would say a milestone, because we all know that League of Nations, modern multilateralism, was born here in Geneva.

And more than 100 years ago, League of Nations came here to the Geneva.

But what we sometimes do not know how important these archives are for our current work.

Because quite often we think about League of Nations, about history, but quite often, in order to find answers and solution to current challenges, it's really important to learn lessons from the past.

That's why this institutional memory is so very important.

And today we're talking about multilateral, the necessity of building modern multilateralism, inclusive, integrated, which is fit for 21st century.

And when we're doing this, it's really important to look also into the past to learn the lessons, to understand how the history of modern multilateralism started, how we started for the first time to use the international law to protect the refugees, to protect the minorities, how we started the process of multilateral, process of disarmament.

And the answers are there in the archives.

That's why this project is very important.

I'm sure it will be of **** interest to researchers, but I would really encourage everybody who is interested in the history of multilateral and who is interested in modern multilateralism to use this fantastic new platform.

Here I stop.

Thank you very much.

DGI, give the floor now to Francesco Pisano, the director of the library.

Thank you so much, Lisandra.

Just to pick up from the director general what we've been doing, library archives here, an institution that was created in 1919, so we precede the United Nations.

What we've been doing is to put at the disposal of researchers, diplomats, staff, students, even the institutional memory that dates back to the origins of multilateralism.

So what happens is that for decades, almost a century, this was an elite experience.

You needed to afford the money to take a flight, come to Geneva, afford the local very expensive life to be able to consult these these archives.

Little by little, with the help of some member states, we started digitising parts of the League of Nations archives and put them at the disposal first of diplomats, the helpless governments that helpless digitise, and then researchers.

But that still was a really small part.

So I would dream was to digitise the whole thing and that dream, as the director general said came came true and now it is available on this platform that Blendin will will illustrate to you in in a second.

So what's important, just to underline what the the director general said, by giving access to virtually everyone interested, we are re injecting the history of multilateralism into the circuits of research, thought leadership, academic think tanks and the like.

And this is the time to do it because this is we are sitting at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year for for multilateral.

This is also the message of the secretary general.

We need to redesign multilateral needs to make it match the type of problems that we are going to encounter more and more in the future.

These problems are now global.

They're non national and so the research that is sustaining this discussion needs to be anchored in history.

Otherwise we will repeat some of the mistakes of history and we will fail to find the solutions quickly enough.

So there is an academic intention, there is a diplomatic intention, and there is a pro multilateralism intention in what?

In what we're doing, that is basically what I wanted to add.

Alessandra, I think what could be interesting before we go to the questions is to see how easy it is now to just visualise the documents, print the documents at home.

And and I hope the blending will show us some, some stats, but also perhaps examples of what, what we could do with the with the platform.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Francesco.

And indeed I give the floor to blend in.

To be fair, who is going to just quickly show us a couple of slides to illustrate the platform blend in.

Yes, thank you, Alessandra.

Yes.

So maybe just to, to get a bigger picture.

So here at the UN Library in Geneva, we are creating more than 10 linear kilometres of primary sources about the history of multilateralism.

So of course we we are talking mainly today about the League of Nations, which represents 3 kilometres of unique documents, but we also have important archives about international peace movements dating back to the the late 19th century.

And also we are in charge of creating the United Nations Geneva archives from 1946 to the present.

This includes human rights archives, Unkat archives, UNEC archives, etcetera.

So the League of Nations archives, of course, it is a gem in our, in our collections.

They were inscribed in 2009 on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

It's a it's really unique group of archives documenting what this very first international organisation with a political mission did and, and in a larger way, multilateralism.

They represent 15,000,000 pages.

So in 2017 when we started this total Digital access to the Legal Nations Archives project, we had 15,000,000 pages of paper, most of it 100 years old, very fragile and heterogeneous.

We had this 15,000,000 pages in front of us to turn into digital files and in and in the end, at the end of the project and this year would be the end of operations, we will have 250 terabytes of of data.

So where where we are now is a project.

So we almost finished physical preparation, 99% of files have been prepared to be scanned, 87% of the total has been effectively scanned.

And there's also work to be done after you scan, you have to do some post production work.

And now we are at 70, almost 75% of this work done.

So we will have one one of the main output of of the project and this is what we are launching today and presenting today is a platform where these archives are available.

So you have the URL at the at the top of of the slide.

And as Francesco and mentioned this, the platform is really accessible for everyone worldwide.

So you can do research.

So the platform gives access to the digitised League of Nations archives, but not only, it's also a catalogue of all the collections that we have that I presented just before International Peace movements and UN archives and also other collections.

We have all sort of of documents.

So it's mainly correspondence.

When we talk about archives, it's not publications, it's not official documents, although we have official documents in the collection, but it's mainly unique documents, correspondence that was sent and received by the organisations.

Because this is also true for for the UN part of it.

But we also have photo collections, we have drawings, we have some artworks.

So a lot of different very interesting items that are.

So the platform gives access to the digitised leg of nations documents and for the rest of the collection it gives access to the the catalogue.

So at least it gives visibility of what can be consulted on site.

So unfortunately with this hybrid setting, I cannot make a demo, so I won't show you documents through the platform, but I am available.

Me and my team, we are available.

Please contact us later if you want to get a demo of this platform.

You can browse by keywords, you can browse by hierarchy of the archives.

It's it's rather complex collections.

So the platform also allows you, you can't see it because this is just a part of the homepage.

But on the homepage you we have a lot, a lot all sort of buttons that you can click and gives you our contact form where you can ask questions here at the at the bottom, at the right bottom of the screen, you can see an icon for chat.

We have a chat service.

So this, this is what is really new with this platform that we were not able to do before is to really interact with any, any person interested in this archives worldwide just online before as Francisco mentioned, people had to come in person.

We had about 150 persons coming and consulting the archives per year.

Now we launched the platform in, in December and since December we registered we, we, we know that more than one 1200 people, different people, different individuals visited the platform.

So it's, it's really a, a huge difference.

We had, we got some feedbacks from, from users and they really insist on the democratisation of access to this archive that it it represents.

This is really important.

Also, researchers are thrilled because it gives them data for the, for the digitised part, it gives them data that they will be able to analyse in very different ways than than before.

Because with AI machine learning visualisation tools, they can really come up with, with very different analysis of history of, of multilateralism.

And they, they all say that it's a big, big step in, in this field.

There's a way to sign up to our services and to a newsletter and yes to so we we, we provide.

So this is changing also the way we, we, we provide services because it's now mainly online.

And do not hesitate to contact us if you want to get a demo, get a visit of, of the archives of the museum that we have just across the corridor here in this building with an exhibition about 100 years of multilateralism in Geneva.

So you can see our contacts on on the screen.

Do not hesitate to write to us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much Blending and yeah, the speakers indeed.

This is really a project that puts Geneva at the centre of the research ward.

I would like now to open the floor to questions.

I see.

Sorry, I have to go up.

OK, I'll start with the with Catherine Fianca Bokonga and then we will go to the room.

I haven't.

I've seen you in math.

Don't worry.

I'll start with Catherine, who writes the hand first.

OK.

Thank you so much, Alicia.

Don't worry.

Not everybody knows the journalist here.

So if you can introduce yourself.

Although I could introduce you.

Catherine.

Yes.

Good morning.

My name is Catherine Fionca Bokonga.

I'm correspondent of France Vancatra and I would like to say good morning to all of you.

Nice to see you.

Thank you for this presentation.

I would like to have some more details about the languages.

I suppose that you have English and French.

What about other languages?

Is it available in other languages?

And if not, are there plans?

Thank you so much for the answer.

Thank you, Kathleen.

Press conferences, we answer each question.

So if you want to go ahead.

Yes, so it's a very good question about languages.

So the documents themselves, they are in all kinds of languages that, sorry, the, the documents themselves are in all kinds of languages that, you know, as I said, it's mainly correspondence.

So you have of course, English and French for the League of Nations.

You have mainly French, I would say, because the, the, the language of diplomacy at the time was more French than English.

But you have both.

But you, you have Georgian, you have German, you have Spanish, you have, it's the, this is too long.

I cannot mention them all the interface itself, so the menus are both in English and French, but the catalogue we are cataloguing and indexing in English only.

Thank you Blandin a massage.

Reuters Yes, good morning.

I was wondering if you could talk me through a little bit more the scale of this project.

I mean, it sounds like so much work going through 10 kilometres of documents.

I mean, how many staff did you need to do that?

How long did it take and how much did it cost?

I know that it was a private donor, but any details on the scale of the project?

Thanks.

Take that sure.

This this is this is a massive project both for the substance in terms of archiving, digitising all the archives.

This is one of the biggest it was ever attempted in the world.

It's massive for the UN because we never really planned something like this until the the the late 2000s and so the day 2010 such thing.

And as you said the staff, first of all the staff we divided the present 3 components and these three components were interlinked but managed differently.

So pre the preparation of the papers, old papers, very delicate breakable papers that needed to be fixed and prepared for digitization, then we a central body of a scanning process and that was located in the laboratory here in the library.

You are now in the library building actually where this, this temporary press conference is hosted.

And then a third part, which is the quality control and the description of every single item, so the people can then research it on the platform that Lundin presented.

The total cost of this, of this project was 25,000,000 francs.

You know, you may, you may think it's a massive cost, but actually it isn't because projects of this size cost much more because there, there was more stuff.

If we weren't the UN, if we were the Smithsonian, there would be probably 250 people working on this.

We did this with London MPL here, 2020 people.

This is also, this is the UN style.

We, we, we tried to do the most with the least.

However we did not compromise with the quality.

And there are two things that are quite amazing about this project.

1 is that we choose the highest resolution files, JPEG files format possible to ensure that the documents that we are storing forever in digital form are readable 50 years from now at least.

And that is, that is something that we we chose to do and invest the money there.

The second thing that is amazing about this project is that when we started, we didn't know what technology could be applied to the preservation of the digital material.

So it's a little bit like inventing something at the time of the floppy disc and asking yourself, how do I make this readable in 50 years?

And you know, it's not the floppy, but you don't know the cloud because he hasn't been invented yet.

So during the the, the time of this project, just in four years, we will we will sort of navigating technology and waiting for the moment that we could make a reasonable assessment or which technology would carry us 50 years.

And that technology has been identified.

And today, because of the choices we made in Geneva, this is also the standard for present digital preservation of the entire USA guitar.

Thank you very much, Francesco, Stefan Busar Leton.

Yes, hello.

Thank you for holding this briefing.

I have two questions.

The first one, I was very much aware of the digitalization process of the League of Nation Archives.

If you could say a few words about the UN archives, because what was digitalized and was, what was not.

And my second question, I remember having this conversation with you with, with this platform now, do you expect some, some kind of different light shed on multilateralism since we will have probably researchers from all over the world because I so far we had a lot of researchers from the north and now we might see what happened in the last 100 years in a different light.

Thank you very much.

So I mean, maybe we start with you on the content of the archives and then I go to French's.

So the UN archives part is not digitised.

We when we are talking about the digitisation project, it is the League of Nations archives.

Nevertheless, we had digitised ourselves with our own team, the the, the human rights archives, the process for the, the, the draught declaration of the human rights.

So this is available online on the platform.

What is available on the platform for the UN archives is the catalogue part of the catalogue.

We are still have a lot, also a lot of work to to do, to do the complete to complete the description of all UN archives.

Yes.

So this, this is I, I hope I answered your your question, Francisco.

On the larger scope, these archives and are the compliments official documents of organisation both in the legal nation and and the United, the United Nations.

In the case of the legal nations, there is much more because at that time there is there was much more correspondence.

Ministers would take the pen and write and and there was there was a different complementarity.

All in all, both archives represent primary sources.

History is written based on primary, primary sources or assumptions on primary sources.

So the more primary sources you inject Stefan, the more research will be sound and and and solid.

So this is this is the intent at this at this time.

Blandin said something very true today, the way humans research is also flanked by the way machines research or if you want, how humans use machine machines to research better.

So there is all, there's a whole new series of correlations that we can we can do and researchers can do using algorithms and and what we call AAI that will give a completely different scope to the research on multilateral.

This is the effect we are expecting now when we see that over less than two months there is a multiplication by a factor of 10 of, of consultations.

I think we are on the right track.

Thank you very much.

And just once, Peter, in the chat, I have put the e-mail of our colleagues in the chat so that you can contact them afterwards.

Jan Eberman.

Jan is our correspondent of a number of German speaking newspapers and media.

Jan, Yes.

Good morning.

Can you hear me?

We can go ahead.

Yeah, great.

Basically, I have two questions.

The first, after you launched this project, have historians, students, journalists and other people still physical access to the archives?

So can they still visit it in person?

And secondly, have you lost some of these precious documents, or were some of the documents in such a sort of bad state that you couldn't rescue them anymore?

Thank you.

So physical access, so yes, we still grant physical access to this archives, but we try to minimise because, you know, we did a, a lot of preservation work on, on the documents and you know, we want to preserve them forever.

So now that they're available online, we, we, we ask people to, to consult them online.

But of course we, if there's a, a specific interest in seeing and filming or photographing specific documents, we grant access.

We also organise exhibitions.

We have the museum here again, as I said in in the in the library where we show original documents.

We know the value of original documents and this emotion that it provokes to visit us.

So we will certainly not put the archives forever in a in a vote and never get them back to the the question about any loss.

No, the documents were not all in a very good shape, but we managed to rescue them all.

They were not in such a bad shape that we could not rescue or save, save them.

So no loss.

Thank you.

Blendin, Peter, Kenny Anaduluansi, thanks for taking my question.

Yes, it kind of relates from Jan's question too, because you mentioned that digitisation has democratised the archives and opened the access up to many people, but paper has a permanence about it and we know that paper can last for 1000 years.

Now you are talking about digitalised documents being perhaps valid for 50 years.

So are you going to do paper and digitalisation?

Thank you, Francesca.

Absolutely, absolutely.

As I speak to you, I'm sitting in the oldest and biggest librarian multilaterals in the world.

We are called Librarian Archives because of that and this is our mission.

So this is not a Public Library, but it's an open scientific library.

Anyone with a valid research reason can come here at any time.

The the website is there to, to take any sort of appointment.

We would actually would like to see more diversified access.

So who are the the returning clients?

There are people who write books on multilaterals or on major figures that have influenced multilaterals in the in the past, under years and sometimes more.

There, there are dozens of books that are written in this, in this place every year, like people coming here, researchers writing, spending the day here.

So yes, absolutely.

Yes, it's both paper and digital.

What Blundin meant in her remark.

It's very important to us because it was one of the fundamental reasons for having the project was the preoccupation that yes, papers last and 1000 years.

If it is treated a certain way, conserve a centre way, a certain way and handle the centre way and otherwise it lasts less.

So what we're trying to do is to give longer life to paper preservation without diminishing, decreasing the access.

The access is guaranteed.

If you want to come here and and study a certain dossier, we'll pull it out for you because this is our mission.

And at the same time create a digital original 15 millions of those that people that are are a **** school student in the Philippines can have access to.

And that is the revolutionary part of it.

More than democratisation, it's a question of unrestricted access.

I don't know if it's democratic or something else, but it's unrestricted access.

And this is what what was our target the 50 years notation is that I don't think there is anybody in this room that can tell me how technology, what technology is needed to read the file in 50 years.

So that's that's what I was saying.

But I think that as technology overlap one another, we're looking at 1000 years also for the digital support if possible, hopefully.

So we have two further questions from Catherine and from Stefan.

I'll start with Catherine, you have a follow up.

Catherine, thank you so much.

I would like to come back to to my original question that was not about the languages of the, the the documents.

It was of the language that people can use to have access to archives.

So English and French as Francesco just mentioned.

In order to open up more, it would be nice if it's the the website could also be in the other UN languages, meaning Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Spanish.

So how much money would you need?

Because it can be also an appeal to certain donors to help you just translate your website into the other languages for people to have access.

And also I have a question about the private papers from private collections.

For that can anyone just contact you and have access also to the private collections papers?

Thank you for your answer.

Thank you, Katherine.

I'll start with franchise condemn Landin.

Yeah, on the, on the, on, on the money issue, Kat.

Yeah, we would need much more money on what we have.

So we are hoping that the, the new access that is much more visible, easier to find, will prompt donors to, to contact us and say, you know, we want to help you make this better.

Definitely we are our, our hope is to have at least the six languages of the UN because these are the official languages of the organisation we work with.

But it could be it, it could be much, much more.

As you said, the, the money question, as you know, in the UN is a sticky one because there is regular budget didn't even allow for this project.

This project did not come from the regular budget of the United Nations.

We need to be to be clear on that.

So I so the the road is you know, is long, but we were going that direction yeah.

So the private paper, yes, they are accessible here in in our reading room.

So we just contact us and you any, any part of this collection that you would like to consult is is available unless the donor has put some restrictions.

But it's very, very, very few papers which are restricted.

So there are many comfortable here on site just on one thing.

So with the COVID situation, we ask our users to register when we can advance.

So there's a calendar accessible where you can reserve a seat in the in the origin room.

Thank you, Blendin.

And I have a last question from Stefan.

Yes, thank you.

It's a follow up of my one of my previous questions.

Given the fact that now you have a democratised access to the League of Nation archives, it means that we'll we'll have researchers from all over the world.

Do you expect, but actually some certain events, for example, I don't know, the invasion of Manchuria will be shed on, you know, different light in the future, even the fact that now all researchers from all over the world will be able to investigate on that.

And my second question is, I know that you came across real jewels during this digitalization process.

Could you give us one or two examples of the jewels you came across in the last year, for example?

Thank you, Brandon or Francesco, who would say, yeah, go ahead.

So on your first question, yes, certainly you know, the fact that these archives are available from everywhere and by everyone will probably shed new lights on, on different questions that were dealt with by by the league concerning the gems.

So I would I tend to say the whole collection is a gem.

So it's always very difficult to point specific documents, maybe some anecdotes that we we found some very, we were very surprised by some items that we found in in the archives.

For instance, there there's a series about customs and how the League of Nations was trying to standardise customs and trade.

And there was a nomenclature of, of list of, of goods that were crossing borders that were established and dry bananas were, were part of that list.

And we found in a file correspondence from a company selling dry or exporting dry bananas.

And guess what we found in the file.

So not only the correspondence, but also dry bananas themselves.

So dating back from the 1920s.

So this was this is an anecdote, but and and you can see them online because they have been digitised.

So this could be a good exercise to try and find them on the platform.

Thank you, Blendin and I'm sure there are many more of these anecdotes.

There is another question from Philippe Geneva Observer.

Philippe, you have the floor.

Oh, yes, good morning.

Thank you very much for the briefing.

I have a question on the data set.

Will you, is there possible to access the data sets or will you make them available in case you know someone would like to research with a very fine granularity and not have to go through the documents themselves by using the metadata?

Brandon So yeah, you can down so the files are downloadable, the metadata are of course visible on on on the screen.

But when it comes to bulk downloads or the bulk, the, the usage of bulk data, then it, it goes through an agreement with, with us, we provide the data sets.

But so we, we, it's an arrangement that we have with, with the pro research programmes or the persons who would like to have access to these data sets, including the metadata.

Thank you very much.

This conclude.

Sorry, Philip, you have a follow up.

Sorry, can you, can you unmute Philip overall on Tanton?

Philip busy a quick follow up on on on on this.

Who owns the rights and what is the policy of using the documents in terms of rights?

So the UN owns the rights, so, but we follow the main rule of the UN about access to documentation, meaning that it's really available, but not for commercial use.

And so This is why we we don't allow downloading of of big data sets freely.

Thank you very much, Boris.

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I think that the fact that we're giving this unrestricted access to the archives is very good from the point of view of supporting the multilingualism.

I'll give you my personal example.

When I was a young researcher of what and I was doing research on international affairs, international Economic Affairs, the necessity to read originals, which were in the library which I consulted, gave me additional encouragement to learn English and to learn French and try to understand some other languages.

So I think the fact that we're giving this access to everybody in Philippines, in Cambodia, in Russia, in China, in Saudi Arabia, is really encouraging people to learn other languages because they will see the benefit of these languages and they also will see the fact that multilateralism can't survive without multilingualism.

But speaking about practical things, because this project we are presenting to you, it's just the beginning.

It's not the end of the story.

It does not mean that what we are presenting to you today will be the same in 50.

In 5 or 50 years, of course, we are going to develop.

And speaking about languages, there are some other parallel tracks which researchers are already using.

For example, well, machine translation.

10 years ago it was just terrible.

These days it's much better.

In five years it will be much better.

And of course, we can assume that the researchers who are doing the research will use other tools provided either by us or by other partners.

Speaking about also digital preservation, of course, we are absolutely sure that it will develop and it will be maybe necessary in the next 25 years to translate the digital forms into some other digital forms more suited for the next tab of the stage.

For us, it's just the beginning of the project.

And apart from all these, I would say a practical things we are presenting, of course, we are presenting you an idea of Geneva as a centre of history, of multilateralism and the centre of knowledge.

Because on the basis of this, we don't know how the things are going to develop, but there might be growing the community of researchers.

Because I can tell you again from my personal experience, well, when you start researching and you even have well digital access to something, the day comes you really want to see it by yourself.

You want to find some additional interconnections.

So I think that the fact that we're having now more and more researchers online will lead also to an increase in physical presence of people in our library.

And they're all basis of this.

We could start thinking how really to turn library and archives into this global centre of history of multilateral and research in multilateral.

Thank you very much, DG.

And maybe, Francesco, you want to take the last question on the censorship or just looking for documents that might not have been transmitted?

No, censorship is certainly not the word.

Blandin can support me here.

She's in charge of the archives.

But these archives here, because there were, these are the official originals or copies of correspondence during the League of Nations.

There were collected by the organisation, haven't been touched ever since.

So that is the the rule #1 of archives preserving that that knowledge.

So I'm not aware of any interference with that policy which is actually ISO compliant.

We use ISO standards like in any other.

It's a science that does that of archives.

So absolutely not censorship.

If there are, if there are parts of of the archives that presents, you know, the lacuna that I, I don't know that either to be true because it's really consistent.

Also because our ancestors were more paper based.

And so the, the use of registry filing systems where you see really letter, answer, answer, answer, answer.

It's really a concatenation of documents, which actually we regret that is not the case today because today could be an official letter to the director general, but she may choose to reply by e-mail.

So I can tell you that in 10 years, you will have the official letter but no trace of the reply on the e-mail.

This was not the case for the Legal Nation.

The integrity of the types of Legal nation is actually splendid from a researcher point of view.

Thank you very much to everybody who has participated in this press conference.

I'd like to thank our Director general and Francesco Blandin for presenting as this revolutionary platform.

I would also thank the journalists that are online and ask them to stay not on this link.

We are going to close this link, but in 10 minutes we have the weekly, the Friday press briefing of the UN Information Service in Geneva, and you have to connect to the new link that has been sent to you this morning.

I'd like to thank everybody again and I wish you a very good day.