Arkiv som besöksmål : en kvalitativ studie av nutiden och framtiden

The aim and purpose of this thesis is to examine the relationship between archives and cultural tourism and how people within the Swedish archives sector relate to this. Specifically, the aim is trying to find out if and how the selected archives are using (cultural)tourism and for example marketing to attract new visitors to their institutions. But also to see if it is so that the archives and their organizations leaders really want to become places to visit, if they really want to open up and become "popularized" or if there is a change aversion. The overall research questions are about How and if the archives work towards the archives becoming places to visit and a part of cultural tourism. To investigate these attitudes I used the following questions: Does the archivists see the archives as a visitor destination and as part of cultural tourism? Has the individual institutions formulated some strategies, plans or assignments to become visitor destinations? Would the archivists like the archives to become visitor destinations? If not, why? Is there conservatism within the Swedish archives sector when it comes to opening up the archives more as a visitor destination? These questions have been answered by conducting interviews and studying literature and organizations. The study has shown that there is an overall positive attitude within the Swedish archives sector for archives to become visitor destinations, but almost no one knows how to implement this in reality. Most of the archives blame their economic situation for not having the time and energy to produce interesting things for tourists to se or do at the archives, since much of this is to package the information from the archives so that it becomes easy to relate to for non archivists. My study has shown that most of the archives have strategies or plans to become visitor destinations. The national archives have assignments to mediate the archives, how they do it is up to the individual archives. When it comes to conservatism among the archivists I could not say how many people that are in some degree conservative, but I can say that the persons that I interviewed at least wasn’t aware of themselves being conservative. Overall the archives is in Sweden are much more open today than for just 15 years ago