Arkivredogörare inom Malmö stad : en självklarhet inom kommunal förvaltning?

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to examine archival clerks within the City of Malmö in regards to their position within their organisations and how their practical work coincide with the policy documents. The thesis also examines the archival clerks own thoughts on their work. In a Swedish context of the public sector archival clerks handle the practical work concerning the archive in their workplace. The underlying background for this thesis is the notion that archivists today are not able to take care of all the different records and archives within their departments or municipal; they thus need help. Therefore archival clerks do a job that not many are aware of even within the municipal. Using semi-structured interviews, six archival clerks working within five different departments in the City of Malmö was interviewed. Policy documents regarding archival work was also analysed. The theoretical framework is based on new institutional theory to analyse archival clerks within the organisations. Furthermore, Thomas Brante’s professional theory was also used to analyse the informants’ thoughts about themselves as well as determine whether or not archival clerks could be considered a profession. The results show that archival clerks have an important role to fill within the public sector due to the Swedish laws that dictate that anyone can ask and receive public records. The records and archives therefore need to be structured and searchable. This is the primary work that the informants told me they do. However, due to the fact that none are an archival clerk first and foremost, and that the archive are never prioritised from the management, they rarely or never prioritise archival work. They also feel that their management and others such as co-workers do not understand their work or why it is important to handle records with care. The informants do however know the importance of the records they handle and the importance of a functional archive. Furthermore, the results also show that even though archival clerks do many of the traditional duties of the archivist, archival clerks do not want to become archivists. Archival clerks do not have the education, competence, interest to organise or knowledge that would make them a profession; and they do not want these things either. Rather they are a pre-profession that have an important role within the public sector to uphold the fundamental pillars of democracy.