2011-2016

The aim of the project has been to analyse the motives for long-term preservation of archival records in Sweden in recent decades. This issue has been somewhat neglected in the discussions on cultural heritage, at least in Swedish academia and society at large. There, the main focus has been on issues such as how museums and history books choose to narrate the past, and how they select among sources that are already there. But how is it decided what archival records that are retained for future generations, as documentary sources from our own time? In the Swedish Archival Act, which came into force in 1991, it was emphasised that public archives are part of the "national heritage", which together with "research purposes" must be considered in archival appraisal issues in government and municipal agencies. In the project, I have investigated how this has actually been interpreted in the state archive system, and to some extent in the municipal archives. However, I have somewhat shifted the focus overtime and to a greater extent analysed the impact on archives from broader political and societal discussions on cultural heritage and uses of the past.

A reason for that is connected to one of the results of the project; discussions in the Swedish archival sphere on questions of heritage and the principles of selection are rather scarce, even if such discussions became more common from the 1980s and onwards. However, among archives in the non-public sphere, such as popular movement archives, there are for example some documentation activities. But on the whole, when cultural heritage issues are discussed in Swedish archives, the focus has generally been on making older archival collection more available and visible for the public through exhibitions and digitization projects.

Still, in the Swedish archives there are continuous decisions on which records to retain, and which to destroy. In order to understand these processes, broader ideological and political discourses in society on heritage concerns must be taken in account. Such discourses, I believe, are just as important as individual judgments, for example in appraisal decisions within the archival sphere. In order to give this perspective a fair share, I included the 1970s into the analyses of the project. Thereby, I have been able to include important factors such as the 1974 reform in cultural politics and the discussions surrounding it, for example. By highlighting this context of archival politics, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of why some (often unspoken) ideas and practices of heritage have been rooted in the Swedish archival system, influencing on the appraisal policies and practises.

A further result that emerged during the project and which have come to focus more on than I predicted from the beginning, concerns the relative singularity of the Swedish public archive system, namely its intimate connection to the Swedish legislation on freedom of information. The legal definitions of archival records has for long been directly connected to the legal definitions of public records. A paradoxical consequence of this is that relatively little archival material often remains from government and municipal agencies, since there is a widespread culture to immediately destroy a lot of material that are considered as "working material" - otherwise they would in general be open for the general public and journalists.

During the project some new questions have arisen, that seems particularly interesting for future research. One of these concerns the question of privacy issues, which was outside the targets of the project, but which inevitably come to the fore during the data collection. Privacy has sometimes been expressed as an argument to destroy archival records, a view that has from time to time collided with heritage concerns, according to which records that are deemed to be privacy sensitive should also to be preserved for the future. These problems of integrity and appraisal have been developed into a new research project, which will commence in the autumn of 2016 ("Ethical destruction? Privacy concerns regarding public records in Sweden, 1900-2015" funded by the Swedish Research Council).

The project deals with the situation in Sweden, but the research context is international, which is taken into account through discussions on research context and comparisons on the archival situation in other countries. This means that the results presented by the project necessarily relate to international research. The same applies to questions on heritage and uses of history, but there the research context is larger in Sweden. The project has been presented at a Nordic conference in Oslo, and I intend to present results from the project at upcoming international conferences.

As regards information on research outside of academia, results have been presented, for example, for professional archivists. After the publication of the book mentioned below, I intend to distribute its results in public lectures and similar activities.

Since the project has been rather small in scale, its results will be presented in a single monograph (its title in English translation: "Archives and Cultural Heritage"), which will be completed during the second half of 2016. This choice was taken since I increasingly found it less appropriate to divide the various results into several articles. As the planned monograph is published by Uppsala University, it will be freely available in digital form. A longer summary in English will be included in the monograph.

Publications

Edquist, Samuel. Arkiven och kulturarvet: Vad bevaras i svenska arkiv och varför, 1970–2010 (preliminär titel). Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2016/2017. Monografi – manus planeras vara färdigställt tidig höst 2016.

Edquist, Samuel. “Arkiven, bevarandet och kulturarvet”, arbetstext som webbpublicerats 2014 (www.academia.edu/4476485/Arkiven_bevarandet_och_kulturarvet) och införlivats i pappersform på Riksarkivets bibliotek (http://libris.kb.se/bib/16965632).