L'archiviste d'entreprise : portrait d'un homme nouveau

Abstract

Sylvie Dessolin-Baumann, The business archivist : a portrait of a «new man». The care for the preservation of business archives is in France a recent phenomenon, at least within the enterprises themselves. Since about twenty years, many enterprises have created archive services with professional archivists, so that a new category of «archivists of the third type» has emerged, different from those colleagues who work for the State or the local authorities. The contrast between the situation of public archives and business archives explains this difference : in business archives there have been years of neglect, resulting in many errors in the arrangement and physical preservation ; frequent changes in the structure of the enterprises (internal organization, mergings) have made it difficult to identify the provenance of the documents ; and few normative texts exist which could ground a professional practice. However, a good management of the «memory» of the enterprises is more and more recognised as a necessity for the good functioning of business activities, though in many cases the archivist still has to play a role of public relations in order to justify his/her own existence in the enterprise. He/she has to integrate the archives in the global information system of the enterprise in order to prove that his/her capacities are not limited to the management of the enterprise's memory in its traditional form. The business archivist, as a homo novus, must have specific qualities, such as a taste for innovation and a talent for training and information. He/she also must master quite a number of tools which are necessary for the life of the enterprise, such as accounting, management techniques, and documentary automation.