Swedish Archival Institutions’ Provision of digital archival materials

The new wave of digital information requires archival institutions to develop new methods and e-services to handle the large amounts of digital information that is in their custody. Swedish Archival institutions have in accordance with the Public and Secrecy Act traditionally promoted the preservation and re-use of public information. The thesis investigates how the Swedish municipal archives are dealing with digital provision of their digital holdings to the public. At present, the Swedish Public Sector Information (PSI) directive places additional demands on them to make digital information available. This information is referred to as open data. This means that that they need to use digital tools to be able to do so. The study involved four Swedish municipal archival institutions, employed a qualitative research methodology and uses the case study method to gain a deeper insight of the phenomenon under study. It employed interviews as a data collecting technique. The results showed that to make digital infor-mation available it requires the implementation of an e-archive which consolidates and facilitates the management of information. The study results further showed that the PSI-directive is not fully understood by some of the interviewed archivists and some of the institutions also lack e-archives. In conclusion, the thesis analysis confirmed that the municipal archival institutions found it difficult to make their digital holdings available and to implement the PSI directive. This was due to organizational problems such as weak budgets, lack of high-quality data sources, knowledge and ambiguities in the PSI-directive. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science