Archives in the Digital Age

Conclusion

Over the past 30 years or so, we have slowly managed to identify all issues related to digital archiving: what, how, by whom, for whom, by what means and according to what strategies and so on. We have also interwoven and understood the links to all legislative constraints relating closely and remotely to these archiving operations. Nevertheless, technological advances are constantly disturbing our peace of mind and often force us to seek and create, sometimes without much hope, innovate solutions to the constraints relating to the velocity, variety and veracity of information flows that are made very complex to master by today’s information and social networks. Indeed, all companies nowadays are collecting digital archives and are confronted with many issues related to organizational, technical, legal, normative and strategic aspects of this process. This is why archivists today must find approaches to this in order to position themselves in an increasingly digital world. The challenge is to set-up strategies for cooperation with other competing professions (professions related to archival documents), such as with computer scientists, lawyers, auditors, data analysts and others.

In terms of document lifecycle management, these archivists and their “competitors” have set-up dozens of standards for digital archiving and records management. We admit that in this book, it was not easy to select some standards in this area, especially when we wanted to discuss other ...