Archives in the Digital Age

2Digital Archiving: Methods and Strategies

2.1. Introduction

Digital archiving today is a reality that has developed rapidly over the past decade or so, in both the public and private sectors. The abundance of EAS (Electronic Archiving Systems) projects in place and in production illustrates this remarkable acceleration.

All companies collect digital archives and are confronted with numerous problems related to organizational, technical, legal, normative and strategic aspects. Technological obsolescence is one of the main obstacles to the sustainability of digital information [HUC 04]. This is why archivists today must find approaches to position themselves to set-up cooperation strategies with other competing professions (professions related to the archival of documents), such as computer scientists, auditors, lawyers, data analysts and so on [HUC 04].

The work of collection, processing and distribution is increasingly carried out by teams in close contact at least with the document production department and the IT department. However, in reality, this work calls for multidisciplinary teams that must work together to carry out multi-dimensional operations, such as collecting archives with the challenges of risk management, cost control, knowledge of user needs that are constantly changing, mastery of methods of access and use of documents, and the evaluation and selection of documents.

2.2. Digital archiving: elements of definition

Archiving is a concept that has evolved ...