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,
Method
Folkrörelsearkivet's capture of records is dependent of the consent and the interest of its member organisations to use the repository for deposits. The set time frame for the project means, that it is desirable to collect archives from still active member organisations, with paper based deposits covering the period from the early 1990:s, except, of course, in those rare cases with organisations with fully digitized records management. This must not, however, result in a random selection of archives. We plan to target recruitment campaign in order to have a strategic sample of archives. Such targeting strives at a sample that will represent different size and complexity of organisations (number of members, economy, whether the organisation has an administrative office or are decentralised to different board members home) and different types of movements. The themes pointed at as of certain interest for the research community (above), singles out a special interest in political parties and activist movements. Most of the political parties, from the moderate left and right wings and with representation in municipal assemblies, has deposited their archives. Folkrörelsearkivet has 54 depositing members, that are local or district cells of a political party. The peace, environement and feminist movements are less well covered, with only a handful members, and will be targeted for an active recruiting campaign. Within the broad theme of non profit organisations' financing, the targeting of particular organisations are not crucial, although some are mentioned above as interesting. Among the 27 members that are non profit economic and co-operative associations, neighbourhood road and real estate associations are well represented and an interesting subject for research. With 100 Sport clubs and 21 religious congregations as members, many of whom have a long history, there is low odds to capture examples for research on their financing. There is a bias in the current membership of religious congregations that may call for recruting: they are all evangelical churches. 13 David Giaretta, Advanced Digital Preservation, Springer, Berlin – Heidelberg, 2011. 14 Results of resarch are summoned up in best-practice handbooks: Uwe M. Borghoff et al., Long-Term Preswervation of Digital Documents: Principles and Practices, Springer, Heidelberg 2010, Katrin Askergren et al, e-arkivera rätt: Sju perspektiv på hantering av digital information med hjälp av OAIS, Näringslivets arkivråd, Stockholm 2009. Appraising of archives will be an ongoing activity during the pursuit of the project. Decisions of the organisations to appraise, will be taken with the help of an advisory board of academics from the Humanities and Social Sciences. This will ensure that the agreed on choice of organisations also also meets the needs of the research community.
Database or archives?
An electronic archival system has several functions in common with a database management system. To a certain extent, an archival system is a database system. However, an archival system differs from a conventional database system as it is more structured to store data in its original form as records or documents and thus often less adapted to answering queries. Depending on different research interests, the archives system will thus function as a convenient source when creating databases, more specific for a subject. It will also serve the purpose of long term preservation of fixed information and harness ”respect the fonds”, the basic provenance principle promoted by the Archival Science discipline. Since it is information created as records by corporate bodies, the traditional concept of provenance suits well for organising the material. The conceptual model internationally used for describing archival systems is NASA:s Open Archival Information System (OAIS, figure 1).15 There are several solutions on the market that follows the OAIS standard. As part of the project, one of those solution, well adapted for small scale electronic archives will be purchased and customized.
Structured information
The principle of provenance, however, does not need to be the only finding aid in the archives. Classification schemes and the indexing of the records will be carried out in the project. Archivists or researchers will be able to mark records using the classificatorion scheme during their research. Indexing will be the most time-consuming of the project and will only be applied to a part of the captured records, especially since digitized records demands manual processing. Both the writing of minutes and book-keeping follows a formal and legally prescribed standard, which easies the process of capture and arrangement. Even if only economic organisations are obliged to follow the law on book-keeping, the methods prescribed by law are commonly followed.16 The tradition for the principles of book-keeping are conservative and its principles are dated as far back as the recipiation of the double entry book-keeping in the seventeenth century. However, for small associations, book-keeping consisting of journals registering cash flows may well be the norm. Information in the documents will therefor be indexed in a standardized and well recognisable manner, that also will only cause minor problems by linguistic changes and principles 15 Reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS), The Consultatuve Committee for Space Data Systems, Magenta Book, 2012,
OCR-scanning and preservation formats
Paper documents will be scanned and digitized in the PDF/A format and with the use of Optical Character Recognition. PDF/A is a format recommended as a standard format by, among others, The Swedish National Archives.17 The PDF/A creates a picture of the document as well as an embedded OCR (Optical Character Recognition) transmission of the text to digital characters. Since most of the text from the 1990s and later is typewritten or an outprint from a digital document, the OCR technique used does not have to be advanced to ensure good results. The born digital records will be delivered in a wide range of formats. The delivering organisations have different routines and different abilities to adapt to the requirements of good preservation formats. Instead, Folkrörelsearkivet will have to adapt. A document containing advice on standards for electronic records already exists and will be further developed during the project.18 PDF/A and open document text (an open source XML-format) are recommended for text documents. The current recommendation with PDF/A for databases is adapted to what the archival repository can handle. The project's ambition is to develop recommendations of formats better suited to maintain the functionality of databases. One possible way is to develop templates in XML- formats and offer its use to the organisations.
Relation to other infrastructures and partners
Since back to the nineteenth century and evolving over time, the archival institutions together with libraries, had been the essential infrastructure for research in the humanities and the social sciences. State Government Archives accessible for research, is organised as Riksarkivet (National Archives), which also hold an advisory surveillance over archival institutions not part of their organisation.
17 Riksarkivet, PDF/A
19 RA-FS 2008:4 20 “CS for e-archiving”, Riksarkivet
Advisory board
The advisory board is composed to maintain the cluster of related planned research, to provide a dialogue with the academic research communities at Uppsala univeristy on important topics to cover and in order to inform the project on best practice in building an electronic archival system. These have admitted to be members of the advisory board.
Uppsala University
Senior Lecturer Samuel Edquist and Senior Lecturer Reine Rydén Archival Science, ABM (Archives Libraries and Museums)
Professor Mats Larsson, Department of Economic History
PhD Per Cullhed, Uppsala University Library
Senior Lecturer Kjell Adolfsson and Senior Lecturer Johanna Norberg, Commercial Law, Department of Business Economics
Jenny Jansson (JA), Katrin Uba, Statsvetenskapliga institutionen, Uppsala universitet
Cecilia Bygdell, Kulturgeografiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet / Upplandsmuseet (JA)
Annika Bergsland, Arkiv Sörmland (JA)
Maria Thysell, Företagens historia, Uppsala län (JA)
Proscovia Svärd, Södertörns högskola (JA) Project scheme
Maintainance after the project
Grant application and grant trustee’s funding
The participant’s merites and employment