Det undanglömda kulturarvet? : Synlighet och förmedling av historiskt material i kommunarkiv

Sammanfattning: The aim of this master’s thesis is to exhibit to what extent municipal archives in southern Sweden work with irradiation and intermediation of the historical material they possess, as well as the reasoning behind these actions. Furthermore, we also investigate whether the municipal archives’ employees experience that intermediation of the historical fonds is part of the archive’s mission. We argue that the municipal archives are institutions that possess a significant part of our shared cultural heritage, to which citizens have a democratic right. An empirical foundation was created using three different methods. A survey was sent out to 44 municipalities in southern Sweden. The same population also had their websites analyzed. We also conducted five in-depth interviews with people working at municipal archives within this same geographic area. The result shows that municipal archives generally work with intermediation of the historical material they possess to a low extent. There is also a clear connection between this lack of intermediation and scarce resources. The results also show that the mission of the municipal archive is primarily centered around administration, but a cultural heritage is also frequently included in the mission. In cases where the municipal archive does work with active intermediation, it is often done on the entrepreneurial initiative of the individual archivist and based on their personal interests, educational background and previous accumulated experience. The material collected was analyzed and interpreted according to three themes, understood as three different ways of viewing the municipal archive’s mission and function in relation to the historical material: The administrative theme, the cultural heritage theme and the market theme. The study concludes that different institutions and employees relate to these different themes in varying degrees, and that this affects to what extent they work with intermediation. Furthermore, we argue that the municipal archives possess power over the cultural memory. It is however not only the archivist who holds this power, since their available means for working towards a democratization of the archives’ holdings are greatly affected by resource prerequisite as well as the overall interpretation of the mission of the municipal archive.