Kommunarkivet i en kulturarvskontext : Institutionella perspektiv på kommunarkivens organisation och utåtriktade verksamhet

Sammanfattning: This thesis aims to unveil existing differences when it comes to the placement of the City Archive within the structural frames of the Swedish municipal governance. Neo- institutionalism and Scandinavian institutionalism have been applied, with the perspective of Terry Cook’s ideas about archival paradigms in archival science, with a focus on outreaching activities. Swedish local governance relies on municipal autonomy. According to jurisdiction, like the Archives act and the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act, every municipality must have an appointed committee responsible for their municipal archives. This means that an archive can be found on different levels in the hierarchy of the local government. Unless the municipal council choose to make an active decision, the municipal executive committee are predestined to act as the local archival authority. Malmö City Archive belongs to the Cultural Administration and states an example of an archive belonging to a differing council. This distinction is the main reason I was interested in researching this area further. In recent years there have been expectations of increased public understanding and interest of the archives as a source of information and knowledge. Therefore, the question arises whether there is a connection between outreach and the organizational structure of the city archives - or not. The research was conducted based on three interviews with archivists and a questionnaire sent to all 290 municipalities. The result indicates that there is no distinct correlation between organizational structure and outreach. 2/3 of the respondents stated that they are engaged with outreach activities. Whereas only 3.4% are organized under an irregular archival authority. The purpose of the performed interviews was to address this question further and look at the archivists’ experiences of how the organizational structure effect the organizational function. According to the archivists there is a positive effect when it comes to the outreaching activities offering great possibilities for cooperation with other GLAM institutions within the same Administration. But when it comes to performing their tasks as supervising archival authority the archivist would prefer a higher placement in the hierarchy of the local government. Preferably directly under the municipal executive committee