Klas Börjesson, Kalmar Art Museum

The aim of the project has been to increase the accessibility of the contents of the archive, and at the same time, decrease the physical handling of and the potential damage to the original documents.

Cataloguing and digitalising the material into a database has enabled research and daily archive routines to be undertaken with greater ease.

The archive was initiated in 1973. It consists of plans, drawings, sketches and other documents produced by Swedish designers. Currently, the archive contains around 100,000 objects. The main part has been donated to the Archive by the designers themselves, or in some instances their heirs. The collections are an important part of Swedish cultural heritage and a great source of inspiration and research.

The archive is part of Kalmar Konstmuseum (Kalmar Art Museum), owned by Kalmar Konstförening (Kalmar Art Association). Kalmar Konstmuseum, together with Arkiv för Svensk Formgivning is the county museum for art and design in Kalmar County.

In 2006 the archive moved into new, specially adapted premises in the historic glass making area of Pukeberg in Nybro. The building of the new archive commenced in October 2004 and the facilities were ready to move into in November 2005. The archive was officially opened on the 31st of August 2006. At the same time the name was changed to Designarkivet.

The archive, together with the design program at the University College of Kalmar, artist studios, and a glass blowing studio forms part of the project "Mötesplats Pukeberg" (meeting point Pukeberg).

This is a platform for regional development within the area of design aimed towards private enterprise, universities and research, as well as towards tourism and the general public.

Regional, national, and international cooperation within the field of design is also in progress.

Digitalisation

The Access funds have been available since the beginning of 2006, and were provided in order to create employment opportunities for workers in the cultural sector, thus contributing to the overall aim of maintaining, caring for, and making accessible collections, objects, and archive material within the entire cultural field. It is administrated by Statens Kulturråd (The State Cultural Council).

With the aid of these two grants, made available at approximately the same time, digitalisation of archived material was able to start at the same time as the collections were moved from the old premises in Kalmar Art Museum to the new premises in Pukeberg, Nybro in May 2006, thus achieving greater synergy.

Various organizations and their methods of organizing and making collections accessible were studied, and the archive decided to use the same database system as the Nordiska Museet and Armemuseum in Stockholm, a Norwegian system called Primus. This system has been construed for cataloguing, administration and presentation of museum collections. The Norwegian database developers have created a database system for cataloguing and digitalising archive material that is user friendly, adjustable to the needs of different organizations, and has low costs of installation and running.

Data was migrated from the old archive database into the new Primus system database. The old database contained a mere 16,000 entries for 98,000 archived objects, and for this reason a large amount of additional cataloguing work is required in order to populate the new Primus database with all the objects in the archive collection.

During autumn 2006, the archive purchased a new server based solution from Hewlett Packard (HP). The system is based on two HP Proliant servers, with extendable hard disc storage and automated robotic tape back up. The operating system is Windows 2003. For the local network (LAN), a Hewlett Packard switch was procured, with Gigabit speed and wireless point of access.

For the Primus system, an Oracle database management system was installed on one of the servers, and on the other server Microsoft Exchange was installed for e-mail and personal productivity tools.

The system has good storage capacity, and currently, approximately 40% of the storage capacity has been used.

In addition to making the existing collections accessible, new archive material is also collected, catalogued and digitalised. The digitalisation is achieved by photographing or scanning the material, and the images are stored in an original TIF-file and also in JPEG format within the Primus database.

A user group has been formed for Swedish users of the Primus system, and the archive is a member of this group. This year Statens Kulturråd has made available funds for the development of the Primus system with Nordiska Museet as the lead developer. In the medium to long term, all the data that has been stored on a Primus Database system owned by members of the user group, will be accessible via the servers of Nordiska Museet to all users.

Within the digitalisation project at the archive, a web page has been created; www.designarkivet.se, showing examples of archived material. The web page is created with the publishing tool easywww, which means that archive personnel can create, update and edit the web page from any computer whenever the need for this arises. Easywww is created from PHP and MySQL. All information on www.designarkivet.se is stored in a MySQL database that is backed-up four times every 24 hours, with the information retained for three months. The database is also a valuable tool to support the process of curating the exhibitions staged by the archive.

All images are published in accordance with the laws relating to publication. The archive collections contains work of approximately 700 designers, and a large task is to obtain the publishing rights from designers or the estates of deceased designers or other agents holding publishing rights.

The aim of the project is to increase accessibility of archived material for students, designers and the general public by more efficient handling of archived material, and to enable research and learning within the design field. The grant made available by Riksbankens jubileumsfond has enabled this important process to be initiated and developed.