Archivage du Web organisationnel dans une perspective archivistique

Several communities have adopted the web as a privileged space for expression and activity, where communication and documentary practices complement and enrich each other. Both in its visible and invisible dimensions, the web is a documentation vault of planetary scope, characterized not only by the sheer amount of information it contains, but by its diversity, complexity and ephemeral nature.  Most current web archiving projects focus on preserving online publications without considering their value from an archival point of view. Only a few web archiving projects target the preservation of organisational or governmental web records. The archival value of the web, especially that of organisational web, does not seem to be justly recognized, despite the continuous effort deployed by certain National Archives bodies to disseminate best practices and policies for organisational web archiving.  This thesis aims to develop a better understanding of the nature of web records and to document current archiving practices intended for organisational web. In particular, this research will look at the following three questions: (1) What general recommendations can be found in archiving policies for organisational web? (2) What are the main characteristics of web records?  (3) Which web record-keeping practices have been deployed in Quebec organisations? To address these questions, this exploratory and descriptive research uses a qualitative approach based on three data collection methods, namely: the analysis of a body of 55 policies and supporting documents related to organisational web archiving; the scrutiny of 11 public websites of various Quebec organisations and of a sample of 737 documents generated by those web systems; and interviews with 21 individuals that are involved in the management and archiving of those websites. The results of this research show that the observed sites are the product of an organisation’s online activity and that they simultaneously document the objectives and the occurrences of an organisation’s web presence. New types of documents that are specific to organisational web have been identified. Documents that have migrated online have acquired a different context of use and new characteristics. Hence, current document management methods must consider the unique properties of documents in a web environment. Only a portion of the observed organisations are involved in the process of archiving their public website. Additionally, the chosen archiving strategies are not always coherent with the recommendations found in web archiving policies, and do not guarantee the sustainability of web records. Those results led us to design a standard policy model adapted to the particular properties of web archives. This model describes the essential components of a web archiving policy and proposes a range of measures that an organisation could implement based on the results of a risks analysis of their public website’s uses in a business context.

Keyphrases: Archival practices, Archives management, Archives typology, Risks analysis, Web archiving, Web archiving methods, Web records, Web archiving policy, Web archiving approaches, Web archiving techniques