Dematerialising public records

In brief:

1. Dematerialising a local authority’s records covers two separate obligations: digital transmission for legal review and digital publication.
2. Digital transmission replaces paper submissions to the prefecture with a secure electronic exchange, through an authorised intermediary.
3. Digital publication replaces or supplements town hall notice boards with online publication, and now determines when some records take effect.
4. Implementation still varies with the size of the local authority and its technical resources.

Dematerialising records means moving from paper to digital for the resolutions, orders and contracts that a local authority must submit for legal review or make public. This shift has accelerated with the digital publication requirement, which applies to municipalities of 3,500 inhabitants or more and to the inter-municipal bodies concerned, while smaller municipalities can choose between notice board posting, paper publication and electronic publication.

How local authorities dematerialise their records

Dematerialising records is not a single mechanism: it covers several obligations, each serving a different purpose and following its own timeline.

This process works as a chain of building blocks: a fully dematerialised record is produced digitally, electronically signed where needed, transmitted for legal review, published online where required, and then archived in a form that preserves its evidentiary value. Each record follows the same sequence, which does not vary from one local authority to another.

What a dematerialised record is

A dematerialised record is an administrative act, a council resolution, a local executive’s order or a local authority contract, produced, transmitted and stored digitally rather than on paper. Dematerialisation is not limited to scanning an existing paper document: a record can also be created directly in digital form, with no paper step at all. Either way, it changes neither the legal nature of the record nor the rules governing how it is adopted: it only changes the medium used for its transmission, publication and storage.

This distinction matters, because two different obligations sit under the same term. The first concerns legal review: some records must be submitted to the State representative, who checks their legal conformity before they become fully enforceable. The second concerns publication: other records, sometimes the same ones, must be made known to the public for them to take effect.

Digital transmission for legal review

Digital transmission lets a local authority send its records subject to legal review electronically, rather than by post or paper filing at the prefecture. The general code governing local authorities allows this electronic route as long as the transmission guarantees the identification of its sender along with the integrity and preservation of the transmitted document.

In practice, a local authority does not send its files directly to the State’s services: it goes through an authorised digital transmission intermediary, responsible for securing the exchange and certifying its date and content. This intermediary can be a shared platform set up by an inter-municipal cooperation body or a local government support agency, or a solution run directly by a local authority large enough to operate one itself and choose its own provider.

For most records, choosing digital transmission remains a decision for each local authority: nothing prevents it from continuing to submit certain documents on paper. But once digital transmission is adopted for a category of records, it fully replaces paper for that category, with no parallel paper and digital channel for the same documents.

The obligation to publish records digitally

The digital publication requirement applies to municipalities of 3,500 inhabitants or more and to the inter-municipal bodies concerned, while smaller municipalities can choose between notice board posting, paper publication and electronic publication. Where it applies, resolutions and regulatory decisions must be made available to the public electronically, on the local authority’s website where it has one, or through an equivalent digital channel where it does not.

This obligation does not fully replace traditional notice boards at the town hall, which remain useful for residents with less digital access, but it has become their mandatory complement, and sometimes the condition for a record to take effect. A regulatory decision that took effect without being made accessible in this way risks having its enforceability challenged.

This logic directly echoes open data obligations: a local authority only meets its transparency obligation once the information is actually accessible, in a format the public can consult without a specific request, not from the moment it was merely produced.

Electronic signature and evidentiary value

For a record transmitted or published digitally to have the same effect as a paper one, it must offer equivalent guarantees of authenticity and integrity. That is the role of the electronic signature, which certifies the signatory’s identity and confirms the document has not been altered since it was signed.

Not all electronic signatures offer the same level of guarantee: the rules applicable to the public sector distinguish several levels, from the simplest to the most demanding, and require a qualified level for records with the strongest legal consequences. A local authority dematerialising the signature of its records therefore needs to choose a process suited to the scope of each category of document, rather than a single solution for all of its administrative output.

The electronic archiving that follows transmission or publication serves the same evidentiary logic: a record held in a storage space whose format guarantees its durability and integrity over time remains enforceable for as long as a paper original kept in good condition would be.

Implementation still varies across local authorities

Larger local authorities and inter-municipal bodies mostly have the technical and staffing resources needed to transmit all of their records subject to legal review digitally, and to keep the digital publication of their resolutions up to date. The picture remains more mixed for smaller municipalities, which often have limited administrative staff and do not always run their own website.

Shared services, run by inter-municipal cooperation bodies or departmental support structures, exist to help these municipalities set up digital transmission and choose a publication channel suited to their size. This shared approach drives a gradual improvement and explains why two municipalities of similar size can, in practice, show different levels of digital readiness, depending on their territory and the inter-municipal structure they belong to.

Dematerialising records and open data: two related obligations

Dematerialising records and opening up public data pursue related but distinct purposes. The first concerns specific legal documents, whose form and content are governed by rules particular to each type of record. The second concerns broader datasets, reusable beyond their original purpose.

The two obligations nonetheless converge on one point: both make digital publication the condition for information to be put to effective use, whether that is a regulatory decision enforceable against residents or a dataset reusable by a third party. A local authority that organises its data management consistently often finds, in the tools built for open data, direct support for organising the dematerialisation of its records.

This convergence also shows up on the citizen-facing side: dematerialising records internal to the administration should not be confused with dematerialising the online services offered to residents, which serves a different audience and different obligations, even though both efforts often rely on the same teams and the same digital tooling choices within a territory that organises its services around data.

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