Measuring the quality of records to improve organizational documentary testimony

This paper presents the important elements of doctoral research into archival science at the Université de Montréal — Ecole de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de information, about the definition and the measurement of the dimensions of quality applied to historical archives. It focuses mainly on three questions: first, what are intrinsic and extrinsic archival qualities; second, what conceptual framework can integrate and structure various dimensions of intrinsic and extrinsic qualities of archival documents; third, which indicators and variables should be tested to verify the measurability of these qualities. After developing a conceptual framework distinguishing four dimensions of quality of archives, a quantitative and descriptive study was conducted to confirm the measurability of fourteen variables of two of these four dimensions that were measured: the credible evidence as an intrinsic dimension example and the exploitability as an extrinsic dimension example.