Archival experiences : Outreach and accessibility through lectures at Stockholm City Archives

Archival work concerning outreach and accessibility is getting increasingly more attention. As a consequence the role of archives and archivists in society has, and continues to change. A common conception is that the roll of the archivist has transformed from a passive curator towards an active mediator of information. This thesis aims to investigate how that change affects archival outreach and public programming. The purpose of the study is to illustrate how archives can use public programming to emphasize outreach and access. The study is mainly focused on two series of lectures at Stockholm City Archives which are a part of the archive´s public programming. Observation is used as a method to study the lectures where I as an observer and participator has taking part of the lectures both physically at the archive as well as online. Postcustodial theory is used as a framework and starting point for the analysis. A postcustodial era emphasizes the need for archives to work with outreach, accessibility and to focus on people rather than records. The analysis is therefore focused on exploring if and how the lectures at Stockholm City Archives can work as a way to highlight the archive as a postcustodial archive. A postcustodial archive where access and outreach is an important part of how the archive communicates with society as well as a significant part of the archive´s self-conception. Archival experiences affects the way the lectures communicate to the people attending the lectures. The lectures works as a way for people to experience the archive both as a place as well as a way to experience the archival records. What kind of experience that is emphasized varies between the different lectures. Usually experi­ence is associated with musems and not as commonly with archives. However, this study proposes that experience can play a key roll in shaping people´s idea of what an archive is. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science