French archivists, the management of records and records management since the nineteenth century: are French recordkeeping tradition and practice incompatible with records management?

Abstract

French recordkeeping tradition and practice, gradually built up since the nineteenth century, are associated with the principle of provenance (respect des fonds) and with the life cycle approach (théorie des trois âges). The concept of records management seems at first glance unfamiliar to French archivists, as the difficulty of translating the term records into French would attest. This paper aims to study how and to what extent French archivists have taken into account the management of records in organisations since the French Revolution and to analyse how they have embraced the very concept of records management and got involved in the development and the implementation of the ISO 15489 standard. The study concludes that language and terminology issues, as well as training and cultural specificities have played a key role in the way French archivists have approached recordkeeping systems over time.