Transcrire et indexer les archives : évolution du rapport entre archivistes et usagers

Over the past decade, the massive digitization of original archival documents, the development and democratization of the internet and, at the same time, the attraction of personal and family history have all encouraged archival services, and the National Archives of France in particular, to undertake collaborative projects for the transcription and indexing of documents. The ambition is to allow for more efficient research in the documents preserved and made available online, and to offer finer precision in their description. In May 2023, the National Archives opened a unique platform to bring together archivists and volunteer contributors, working together on collaborative projects. This platform offers a point of view from which the results of these joint ventures can be analyzed and their impact on the missions carried out by professional archivists and their relationships with their public. It puts paid to the cliché image of the lonely archivist in his or her ivory tower, drawing up inventories of ancient documents which will be communicated to a handful of erudite researchers. Our present contribution sets out to question the effects of these collaborative initiatives and their effects for the relations between archivists and users, based on the example of the National Archives of France.