Ett digitaliserat Sverige : en studie om digitalisering och krav vid kommunala museer

Sammanfattning: The aim of this master thesis is to examine how institutional rules and demands, present in cultural politics, affects the work with digitalisation in local museums. According to narrative trends in Sweden’s national cultural politics, digitalisation has the potential to encourage and increase democracy by enabling participation and wider access. Therefore, digitisation practices in cultural institutions are frequently presented as a tool to achieve the national cultural politics objectives. During the year of 2009, the arts committee of the region of Scania gave the culture administration the assignment to create a strategy for digital culture. The digital strategy was presented in 2012 and accompanied with an action plan. One of the actions in the plan was to demand digital strategies from all the cultural institutions that received fixed activity funds. However, the demand did not include any extra activity funds. This presented an interesting opportunity to examine how local museums work with increased demands regarding digitalisation. By doing interviews with museum staff in combination with a comparative text analysis of digital strategies, this master thesis explores how three local museums handle increased demands of digitilsation activities from cultural policy. The results are then analysed with a new institutionalism perspective. The study shows that other than the demand for a digital strategy, there are barely any clear demands regarding digitalisation. This seems to be associated with the fact that the museums receive no extra funding for digitisation activities. There is however a clear political interest since the mid-90s and there are similar normative narratives that are presented on different levels. This could be coercive and normative isomorphism that affects how the institutions handle questions and activities regarding digitalisation. The study also shows that digitalisation is an activity that the museum field embraced early on and is something that seemed to have fit the role and needs of the museums. However, it also seems that the local museums struggle to keep up the digitalisation activities without more funding. This means there is a paradox between increased political interest regarding digitalisation, but few funding opportunities for local museums that create sustainability.