Stadsarkiv i ny kostym : arkivanställdas upplevelser av den utåtriktade verksamheten

Sammanfattning: In the government's report Arkiv för alla –nu och i framtiden from 2002, one of the goals was to increase public understanding and interest of the archives as a source of information and knowledge. To do this, the report concludes that the archives have to become more visible and more accessible to the public. The aim of this master's thesis is to examine how the archive staffs in the City Archives of Malmö and Stockholm are experiencing the fact that the archives in recent years invested heavily in reaching out to a larger audience and attracting new visitors. I decided to look into and compare their experiences, thoughts, attitudes and feelings about the increased outreach activities. It turned out that there were more differences between the archives than I had expected. The main difference is that Malmö City Archives has a district library to run and that the archive has become a general meeting and hang out place. This has led to disputes between staff and management as a large part of the staff believes that archivists shouldn’t take care of library visitors and others who do not come there for the archive specifically. They think there is too much focus on the library and that more librarians should be recruited who can take care of library visitors. In Stockholm, however, the focus on outreach activities has inspired many people to see archive documents, enough that the archive now has two employees running the information desk. The visitors in Stockholm consist of genealogists, scholars, researchers and people that take part in the program activities. Stockholm City Archives has not invested in becoming a public venue which is also reflected on the visitors. All the informants in Malmö and Stockholm are positive to outreach activities and they consider it important to reach out to the public and to work in a way that everyone in the community knows what archives are. By using New institutionalism, Scandinavian institutionalism and a organizational change from a social psychological perspective I have explained the results of this report. I believe this report can be of use and of interest for other archives that have intentions in investing in outreach activities.