Effects of the Complexity and Automation of Administrative
Procedures on Appraisal: The Example of France
Rosine CLEYET-MICHAUD
Archives de France
Centralized to a fault since the beginning, France, in the last twenty years or so, has been confronted with a trend towards decentralization and devolution that is affecting the production of records and the process of appraisal. The automation of administrative procedures, still in its early stages, should alter our behaviours even further.
The Effects of the Explosion of Administrative Procedures on the Process of Appraisal
Until recently, the French government followed a very simple organizational plan— headquarters (or ministries) and external services of the ministries (presence in each of France’s 100 departments)—with near-identical organizational planning and archival production from one department to the other. Within this plan, local institutions (departments and communes) played only an extremely limited role.
The French practice in the area of document appraisal was, then, as follows: establishment of "management charts" showing, for a single administrative authority (service within headquarters or external service) and consistent with the authority’s organizational plan, the list of records produced, the administrative useful life and the ultimate fate. For a given sector of government, the charts of the service within headquarters and external services were correlated for a more "scientific" approach to appraisal through better knowledge of the procedures.
Decentralization (transfer of powers to a local community), devolution (transfer of powers from a central service of the State to a decentralized service), and the creation of new structures (public institutions) resulted in an explosion of administrative procedures and, often, the sharing of a given procedure among several authorities.
Our appraisal practice has had to take this state of affairs into account, and we now proceed as follows:
- field survey conducted by the National Archives, by four or five territorial archivists spread throughout the territory at the decentralized level, to learn about the missions, functioning and organization of the services concerned (State services, public institutions, territorial institutions, private law entities with a public service mission); to prepare the list of records produced in the context of these missions; to make the initial proposals of the administrative useful life and ultimate fate of the records; and to establish management charts by service or agency;
- synthesis of the data thus gathered by the relevant services of the Direction des Archives de France (directorate the Archives of France);
- establishment of a working group of archivists and professionals from the sector who have contributed to the establishment of the management charts, representatives of the directorate of French archives and the headquarters of the ministries concerned; researchers to work on the synthesis established; to identify duplicates; to verify the administrative useful life; to select the records to be retained for future research; to prepare the list of records that could be eliminated;
- finalization of a records management chart for a specific sector and by administrative procedure.
One example of a procedure thus finalized is the completion of the records management chart for records produced in the context of the child welfare office. This procedure, besides having been imposed on us by the changes the French government has undergone, has the advantage of a more scientific approach to appraisal, in that it takes administrative procedures into account more effectively than in the past. Obviously, it is made possible by the existence of a central archives directorate.
The Effects of the Automation of Administrative Procedures on the Process of Appraisal
Another revolution awaits us in the area of appraisal. If necessary, we will have to focus our appraisal work no longer on records, but on data. An example of this change is the study currently being done on the management of the electronic records produced by the jurisdictions.
Rosine CLEYET-MICHAUD
-Degrees
- Paleographic Archivist (1971).
- Positions held - current and previous
- Curator at the Archives du Loiret (1971-1978).
- Director of the Archives des Alpes-Maritimes (1978-1992).
- Director of the Archives de la Loire-Atlantique (1992-1995).
- General curator in charge of technical service for the Archives de France (since July 1995). Technical service is responsible for developing normative and prescribed texts for French archives; a major portion of these texts sets the conservation rules for public archives records.
- Other activities in the field of archives and within the scope of the CIA
- President of the Association des archivistes français from 1986 to 1988.
- Member of the Management Committee of the branch of the Associations professionnelles d’archivistes (SPA) from 1988 to 1992.
- Member of the Editorial Board of Janus from 1992 to 2000.
- Secretary of the committee on Bâtiments et équipements d’archives (CBQ) from 1996 to 2000.
- Chair of the Committee on Appraisal of the ICA from 2000.
- Member of the International Institute of archival sciences of Maribor, Slovenia ,from 1996.
- Publications on contemporary archives handling
- « L’instruction du 31 décembre 1979 sur le traitement des documents des Archives départementales postérieurs à 1940 » in Gazette des Archives, nlle série n°141, 2ème trimestre 1988, p. 88-93 ».
- « La sélection dans les archives : une réflexion et une pratique en constante évolution » in Tri, sélection, conservation. Quel patrimoine pour l’avenir ? Actes de la table ronde organisée sous l’égide de l’Ecole nationale du patrimoine, 13-25 juin 1999 (Editions du patrimoine, collection Idées et débats, 2001, p . 48-53).
- Business Address
- Direction des Archives de France
- 56 rue des Francs-Bourgeois 75143 PARIS Cedex 03 France
- Tel : 33 1 40 27 67 04
- Fax : 33 1 40 27 66 30
- E-mail : rosine.cleyet-michaud@culture.fr.