Non Government Organisations' Archives in the Information Age
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Non Government Organisations' Archives in the Information Age Aim of the project The aim of the project is to capture born digital records and to digitize corresponding paper documents from Non Government Organisations (NGO:s). The materials will be curated and preserved in an electronic archival system which will increase its accessability. The project will focus on the capture of records central to the decision-making process and the economy of the organisations (minutes and its appendices, book-keeping). The relevant time-frame is from the 1990s and onwards. The spatial frame will be the local and regional organisations within Uppsala county. As NGO:s adapts their record-keeping to digital information technology, this also prevents them from delivering their archives to the archival institutions for curation, long-term preservation and re-use. This is likely to compromise the evidential value of the records and will create discontinuity of the archival evidence. The project address this discontinuity – and hence eliminate the creation of a ”black hole” in the digital information. The archives usefulness for research communities Folkrörelsearkivet för Uppsala län (The Uppsala County Popular Movement Archives) is an archival repository with a collection of archives, from Uppsala cpunty: a region north of Stockholm with approximately 360 000 inhabitants on 8209 square kilometers. The archives contains a wide range of associations in Uppsala county: labour unions, political parties, women's organisations, temperance orders, cooperatives and economic associations, religious congregations, peace and defence organisation etc. All in all, the repository houses more than 3 500 different archives from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.1 Folkrörelsearkivet is also in itself an association of organisations, close to 600 members use the repository as a deposit for their records, with a consent that the depository also will be accessible for research. Although most of the archives are from defunct organisations, the main part of new accessions comes from Folkrörelsearkivet's member organisations. The minutes and book keeping are of general interest for Social Science and Contemporay History research on NGO:s, social movements and civil society in a local or regional context. The archives contain information suitable for analyses of the organisations’ economy and organisational structure, but it is also key information for the analysis of organisations’ activities. Minutes are probably the archival material most wanted by researchers with interest in different activities of the 1 For an overview of the collection, see: http://www.fauppsala.se/databaser/sok-arkiv/ organisations, while book-keeping deserve broader use as they contain useful information not only about the finances of the organisations but on activities as well. A focus on local and regional organisations within a given region, gives an option to research on connections between organisations. It also captures the small sized organisations that are less well represented in other sources. Several grand themes of academic interest can be addressed to the archives. Globalisation, neoliberalism and a reorganisation of the welfare state are some of them.2 The coming of the Information Age was well announced already in the 1980:s, as a third wave of industrialism.3 It consists of the development of information and communication technology as the new economic engine and a departure from industrial production towards the selling of services and knowledge. It had, and still has, a considerable impact on the societies in which social movements act, as well as the ways in which the social movements' record-keeping activities are organised. An e-archive system that captures born digital records as well as digitased paper documents, is well apted for studies of the how information technology has an impact on organisational structure. Digital archives would facilitate studies of organisations that has emerged as important for a new political agenda. Feminism, environmentalism and the peace movement are not new phenomena, but have in the last quarter increasingly established themselves within traditional parties, or have formed core issues in new political parties.4 In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and growing intellectual debate over capitalism and the market economy.5 the economy of non profit organisations is a potential field of research in Economics and Economic History. New information technology gives way to non-local communities, to crowd-funding and sharing economics, as interstitional economic behaviour.6 Hitherto, non profit organisations has been less in focus than private enterprizes and state finances, despite their social importance and financial specifics.7 Consumer’s co-operations and Kindergarten co-operations are two examples were economic issues are preponderant.,8 Religious congregations and sports clubs are two examples of organisations, where traditionally the members own idealistic engagement in activities has been vital for the economy, and where the organisations in their different manners also shoulder broad civic responsiblities. The transition of the industrial structure has had an considerable impact on professions an of 2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990. Manuel Castells, The Information Age; Economy, Society and Culture, vols i–iii, Blackwell, Malden MA, 1996–2000 3 Alvin Toffler 4 Get a good reference (Castells) 5 Piketty, Capital in the twentifirst century, Josef Stiglitz, 6 Arun Sundarajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based capitalism, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2016 7 Pernilla Jonsson and Silke Neunsinger, Gendered Money: Financial Organisation in Women’s Movements, 1880 – 1933, Berghahn, Oxford, 2012, p. 4. 8 Richard C Williams, The Cooperative Movement: Globalization from Below, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007 social and economic conditions. Uppsala county offers a varied socioeconomic landscape. The southern parts with Uppsala municipality is increasingly a part of Stockholm suburban system relying on a knowledge based industry and service industry. The northern part of Uppsala county was traditionally an important part of the iron industry belt. Here, the tile industry, engineering industry and forest industry are still important sectors, although they witnessed a decline in the volume of labour involved. Automation, fewer and bigger farms and a resulting decline in work force has also been the case with the county's agrarian sector since the 1950:s, a continuing trend also in the last 25 years.9 The trade unions’ archives are the most direct way for research on the economic changes that took place and the consequences for the common labour force. The minutes tells us about hard times and better times coming, how professions has expired or experienced fundamental changes in skills, when ever more of the process became automated. International research In Archival Science, the new information technology has been generally concidered as a challenge and a paradigmatic shift. David Bearmann was early to recocnize its consequences for the organisation, where the classical bureaucratic in the early 1990s was prognosed to give way to more flat networking organisations.10 Although the flat networks proved to be less of the future form than it was thought in the 1990s, social movements today are less dependent on a formal structure for organising, as information systems supplements with a structure (as in social media). The growing international significance of the Australian continuum model for archiving and its series system, can be understood as one consequence of the digital revolution. The traditional way archivists use to decide the provenance of the archives, the fonds, by deciding the organisational limits, is challenged by information resources in electronic systems that are not contained within a single organisation. 11 NASA:s Blue Book on an Open Archival Information System (OAIS),12 has been widely acknowledged as a standard for describing the functions of an archive. It’s merits are that it is a standard that is open for every thinkable kind of objects worth of archiving (not only digital objects), as well as it well covers the different functions one needs in an archival system: from supplication of information packages, to the long term preservation and dissemination to a designated community of present or future users. However, it is just an open standard, a check list, not a rough and ready archival system. Different solutions for digital preservation, using OAIS as a 9 Irene Flygare, Sveriges Nationalatlas 10 David Bearman, "Diplomatics, Weberian Bureaucracy and the Management of Electronic Records in Europe and America", American Archivist, vol.55 (1), 1992, p.168-180 11 Sue McKemmish, Franklyn Herberrt Upward, Barbara Reed, Records continuum model, Encyklopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 2009. 12 Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS), Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, Blue Book, January 2002, <https://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/650x0b1.PDF> standard, has been formed – such as the CASPAR project.13 Several techniques for long term preservation of digital information has been suggested, Continous migrating to new storage and converting to new formats, or emulating platforms that would be able to read old formats. Some standards, like the XML for document markup, has been appreciated