Den oändliga informationen : Totalbevarande, tillgänglighet och sökbarhet avseende patientjournaler inom Region Skåne

Sammanfattning: The background to this master´s thesis is a decision by the regional council in Scania, Region Skåne, to preserve all medical records forever. Through the examination of documents and interviews with people associated with the regional archives, and by using Scandinavian institutional theory and time theory, this study looks into how the decision by the regional council is understood and implemented within the organisation. A clearly stated motivation behind the decision was to facilitate future research, which can only be achieved by maintaining information availability and searchability. A continuously expanding information volume requires the integration of standards, meta data and search ways at an early stage in order for the information to remain accessible. The study shows that opinions can differ about what it means to preserve something forever. Beside the individual conceptions of time, an interesting contrast was found between the institutional time conceptions of IT-professionals and archivists, which could lead to miscommunications when designing technical systems for long term preservations. Epistemic information loss and physical destruction of the material are the main challenges regarding long term preservation in general. To counter the threat of physical destruction the information must be stored in a stable and controlled environment, and regularly migrated to new data carriers. Regular linguistic revisions, among other things, also need to take place to avoid epistemic information loss. Organisational challenges can be addressed by imposing an archive perspective to the whole information life cycle. In the discussion I look beyond the field of archive studies to discuss how exorbitant a cosmological interpretation of the council´s decision would become. The institutional time conception within Region Skåne, among both archivists and decision makers, assures that everyone involved have a reasonable idea of how to pragmatically interpret and act on the decision to preserve medical records forever.