Historians and archives: historical science and archive theory in Sweden 1880–2020

Sweden has a long tradition of documenting, registering and archiving, something that historians benefit from. This project examines how the archives change as conditions change and the archivists' professional role changes?

The project will in various ways problematize the relationship between historical research and archival science for more than a century. There has long been a kind of symbiosis between historians and the archives, but in recent decades a distance has begun to arise between the two spheres, which in itself is also characterized by a greater span between different orientations than before. For archivists, there has long been a kind of dichotomy between taking care of the documents and documents that are created here and now for future preservation, and caring for already historical archives. This paradox between, on the one hand, present and future and, on the other hand, history / cultural heritage is increasingly being put to the test through society's accelerating digitalisation and flow of information.