Nyckeln till arkiven : En kritisk diskursanalytisk studie om interoperabilitet och kollektivt minne

Sammanfattning: In the democratic process, of discussion and decision making, there is a need of reliable and authentic information. Archives are authentic and reliable information and also provides long term accessibility. But the public archives potential isn´t utilized enough at a societal level. The public archives are organized in a decentralised manner, and there are no common accesspoint at a national level. In the thesis this issue of accessibility and use at a societal level, is discussed in terms of collective memory. In a digital environment, these organizational limits could probably be overcome, but there is a need for new goals, perspectives and frameworks for the management of public archives. In an e-government context, interoperability is often mentioned in the discussion of accessibility. Interoperability could be understood as the ability of diverse organizations to interact together towards common goals, and include technological, semantic, organizational, legal and political aspects. The hypothesis like assumption of the thesis is that interoperability could contribute to making the archives a more significant part of the collective memory.The thesis uses a case study methodology, and a critical discourse textual analyses. Records Continuum Model and archival perspective about collective memory, particularly Jimersons distinction of collective memory from other types of memory, is used as a theoretical frame for the analyses. The case is the project e-archives and e-diarium, which is a Swedish E-delegation project, driven by the National Archives. Central documents from the project is analysed, as is important documents for the work on e-government for the contextual understanding.The results indicate that interoperability may contribute to making the archives a more significant part of the collective memory, practically and discursively. Practically, it provides conditions to share information and remove barriers for interaction. Discursively, it contributes to an overall perspective of public administration, and switch the view from each single organization to the citizens and the society as a whole where the information is seen as a common societal resource. Interoperability is also an important factor in the development of a common information architecture for the whole of the public administration. This change in perspective could make the archives, when included in the e-government, change perspective from the archives creators to the end users and society at large, and give more effort in making the archives accessible in the collective dimension.