Norwegian version

Publication no. 28:  Archives, Justice and Democracy

The purpose of the archives forming a basis for justice and democracy was the topic of the conference “Archives, Justice and Democracy”, arranged by the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling) on 20^th – 21^st February, 2006.  Participants from both home and abroad presented a series of interesting papers, and the current publication is a collection of the contributions presented at the conference.

Gudmund Valderhaug:  The hospitable archive?

Archivists receive daily requests from individuals for documentary information related to their different personal requirements, concerns that may involve for example pension rights, inadequate education or training, or time spent in an orphanage.  Over the past 10 to 15 years there has been a clear shift in the public’s use of the archives, with a growing number of requests, particularly from the municipal archives, from individuals who are searching for personal documentation relating to their legal rights, in order either to pursue justice and compensation or to obtain information about their own personal history.  In the Bergen City Archives in 2004, 55% of the requests from the public involved personal documentation relating to legal issues; around half of the cases involved information about a stay in an orphanage.

I would point to two reasons for these developments:

• Firstly, the post-War rise of the welfare state allowed access to the public at large to a series of new welfare benefits.  Today we are seeing the first generation of individuals who for one reason or another have not had access to these services and are now seeking redress for this failure, and are turning to the archives to obtain supporting documentation.
• Secondly, the efforts of aid organizations working on behalf of various ethnic and social groups have mobilized a whole range of individuals to demand their rights.  At the same time the spotlight has been put upon the archives as providers of documentation relating to legal rights.  Increasingly, the public has been made aware of what the archives can contribute and is therefore turning to these institutions.

We can assume that supplying personal documentation relating to legal rights will be a core function for the archives – and in particular the municipal archives - for the 21^st century.

A major challenge that could face the archivist when meeting individuals requesting documentation from the 1950s and 1960s, is the divergence between the needs of the clients for documentation on the one hand, and the archives themselves which may appear selective, deficient and possibly biased on the other.  The Dutch archive researcher Eric Ketelaar has shown how the process of storing documents in the archive is founded on a series of “conscious or subconscious choices (based on social or cultural factors) as to whether an item is worth storing in the archive”.  These choices change with time and location because social and cultural factors are always in flux.

The archivist acts a go-between between the person requesting the information and the archive where the document is to be found.  In a sense she is in a position of power, in that she controls access to the information sought, and in fact, knows more about the sources than the applicant.  She can act as a tool either for justice or injustice.  How should an archivist act in a meeting with an individual requesting documentation dealing with injustice and violation, especially if we know that the available documentation is probably incomplete?  We can handle the request in a prescribed and correct manner but without “going the extra mile”.  Normally, this means that we provide the help to search the catalogues and other indices, and if the document can be identified we arrange for it to be retrieved from the archival store and made available to the user.  An alternative way is to provide an individualized service to the user.  The archivist possesses knowledge enabling her to “research the semantic genealogy of the archive” in order to unveil the conditions for archival selection that prevailed at the period in question; what motivation determined the procedures in place at the time?  What type of information can one assume has been stored in the archives?  Is it likely that some of the documents may have been lost?  In order to probe these and similar questions, the archivist may have to sit down with the client and spend a long time with him.  The combination of incomplete archives and clients with particular demands means that the task of providing a service to this group is highly work intensive.  The work may have negative effects on other important duties demanding attention in a short-staffed archival institution.  So what is the right thing to do?

Those approaching the archives to obtain documentation relating to their legal rights are in many respects strangers to the archives.  The way we greet them is ultimately an ethical question.  Ethics, as we know, involve questions of how we relate to other human beings, and norms and values that might help us choose between right and wrong.

The international archival organization the International Council of Archives (ICA) has prepared its own ethical guidelines for archivists.  However, these are unfortunately of no help to us beyond providing the recommendations to offer impartial help.

One man who does provide an answer is Jacques Derrida, who states that our greeting of the stranger, the Other, is the fundamental ethical question of our time.  And, as he says, “ethics equals hospitality”.

Derrida’s answer is thus to meet the Other with hospitality.  The same idea of a hospitable archive can be found – albeit formulated differently – in the Report to the Storting on archives, libraries and museums, which emphasizes that it should be a major aim of the archives, libraries and museums to award equal rights to all individuals both to information and to sources of knowledge.  In this way these institutions can contribute to the provision of equal opportunities for all to develop into active citizens to participate in a living democracy.

The provision of equal access to archival information involves the development of diverse and differentiated services, because the individual comes to the archives with different experiences and assumptions.  Those with little or no knowledge of what can be found in the archives need more information and guidance than an experienced archive user.  Such practice would form the basis for archival justice, giving all the right to derive the benefit they require of the archival services, and at the same time providing all with the right to become active participants of the archives.

As far as I know, no procedures have been laid down to help archivists to provide differentiated services.  However, I cannot believe that there is a division of principle between this task and the other tasks associated with the creation of an excellent archive system that is all-encompassing.

David A. Wallace: “Historical & Contemporary justice and the role of the archivists”

David A. Wallace of the Catholic University of America writes about “Historical & Contemporary justice and the role of the archivists”.  The unabridged article: David A. Wallace: “Historical & Contemporary justice and the role of the archivists”

Mikael Eivergård: The Swedish sterilization question

Mikael Eivergård of Jämtland Läns Museum in Sweden writes about the issue of sterilization in Sweden. The background is two articles published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in August 1997, in which the social journalist Maciej Zaremba tells about the Swedish policy of sterilization during the years from 1935 to 1975.  Zaremba maintains that 62,000 Swedish citizens – in particular women – were forcibly sterilized by the Swedish authorities during this period.  Second only after Germany under the Nazi regime, Sweden has carried out the most systematic and extensive number of forced sterilizations.  The sterilizations formed a part of a project of racial cleansing, which according to Zaremba was one of the elements of building the Swedish welfare state and the ideology behind this.

The articles attracted a lot of attention both at home and abroad, with the discussions centring on whether the sterilizations were carried out by force or were voluntary.  Eivergård, with others, was given the task of investigating the archival files covering just over 1000 cases of sterilization.  In the conclusions to his article, Eivergård writes about the issue of the power of the archive:  Somewhere – just when and where is hard to say - the presumptions governing the potential power of an archive change.  If a person has been committed to a mental institution or is in the social care of the local authorities, a public official has the right to select from the written words and take decisions based on what is contained therein.  The file categorizes a person on the basis of say a history, a diagnosis, a set of problems or a prognosis – in other words producing a kind of prediction for the future.  For those of us who today are working on this type of issue, the archive has in part developed a different potency.  We are no longer studying the individual or the person described – the person is no longer our object. Instead we are using the materials in order to “investigate the investigators”.  The concern is no longer whether the woman before the assessor really did have painted nails or whether she was chewing gum, except for the fact that such issues were of interest to the assessor, becoming a part of the information to support the authorities’ judgement of her character.  In recent years the Swedish files on sterilization cases have been used in a way not intended when they were first produced – to provide restitution and award financial compensation from the Swedish state to people who were forcibly sterilized.  Another aspect of this type of archival material is that it can lead to a discussion of the ways that power is implemented in modern society.  It is clear that it can and should be used as background for a deeper discussion of human values and rights, of the relationship between the state, science and the individual, and not least of the power of morals and norms.

Bjørn Westlie:  Unresolved justice and injustice stored in the archives

The historian Bjørn Westlie has been investigating what happened when members of the Jewish population were arrested in Norway during the War, and not least what happened to the property of Jewish people.  In his article, he asks:  Why is the history of what happened to Norwegian Jews not an integral part of our history of the Occupation and a part of the curriculum in Norwegian schools?  He calls this “unresolved justice” and injustice which stored in the archives.  “Unresolved justice” in this context means that there are truths hidden in the archives or documents that could lead to justice being done if they surfaced.  The question is how these truths can be retrieved and resolved.  By “injustice stored in the archives”, Westlie maintains that there are facts stored in the archives about violations and criminals which are today hidden because of a lack of interest on the part of historians and others.  The situation is exacerbated because of the restrictive laws on archives.  Those who carried out misdeeds during the Second World War and those whom Westlie calls “office henchmen” have names and numbers.  But they are protected.  Westlie asks: Can we do anything about the injustice stored in the archives?  Or is this a naïve idea?

In his article, Westlie describes the ways in which in his view The National Archives (Riksarkivet) acted out of political motives and contributed to the shaping of events by its participation and its comments in the debate on compensation for Jewish claimants, and also the references made by The National Archives to the rules governing personal privacy.  Westlie writes: I have reached the view that the rules governing personal privacy are being misused, for example that the 60 year rule is applied to these cases.  Who is being protected, and who in reality needs protection?  Is it the victims or is it well-connected lawyers and their families?  Norway is, of course, a highly restrictive country, in many ways much more so than other nations.  Just look at the United States of America.  All countries have unwritten or dark chapters relating to their history.  Accounts of war, whether they be wars of liberation or conquest, are the most traumatic, manipulated and most problematic of all accounts covering historic events. The Israeli historian Tom Segev, well-known for his books on Israeli history and wars which are based upon archival materials, told me in December 2005 that the history of Israel is political.  The writing of history cannot be impartial.  Nevertheless, Israel has a more open policy governing its archives than Norway.  The history of Norway at war has been written in black and white – good against evil – Nazis and Germans against those who did not falter; the history of how the holocaust in Norway involved not only the actions of the Nazis and the Germans, but also those of ordinary Norwegians, does not fit into this picture.  It is often said that history is written by the victors, but the truth goes beyond this proposition; the victims, the real losers of the war, are largely forgotten when the war is recounted.

Lars Borgersrud:  The same truth for high and low?

The historian Lars Borgersrud continues the criticism of The National Archives in his article “The same truth for high and low?”, where he discusses two examples of the ways the archival services have interpreted the rules of personal privacy. The first example involves Norwegian military officers and their association with Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian National Socialist party, before and during World War II.  Borgersrud’s example involves a researcher who had made public the fact that many Norwegian officers had been members of Nasjonal Samling but that many of them continued their military and public career in post-war Norway, as well as being presented as wartime resistance fighters.  Among other issues, two officers with a prior Nazi background had been significantly involved in the creation of Norway’s Resistance Museum.  The publication of these facts led to much debate, the result of which was that the researcher was blacklisted by The National Archives for breaking the Official Secrets Act.

The other example deals with a very different social group, the children of Norwegian mothers and German army fathers during the Second World War.   These were the subject of an investigation by an historian involved with a research project by the Ministry of Social Affairs in 2001-2004 into Thus this was not a question of the élite of our society, the heads of the armed forces, but rather the very weakest, low down on the Norwegian social ladder.

The researcher came across a curious story in one of the archives concerning three wartime children who had a problem background.  Their fathers were dead and the fate of their mothers unknown.  The children were staying in different orphanages.  However, the colleagues of the three fathers, realizing that the children faced an uncertain future, had collected money from all the men in their Company and put the money into an account in Oslo Sparebank (Oslo Savings Bank).  The savings books were passed on to the German organization for infants and maternity homes Lebensborn for the money to be spent on the children.  The War then ended and officers of the Police department for treason and the Directorate for enemy property moved in.  The savings books were passed to the children by an official in the Ministry of Social Affairs.

The unhappy children, for whom the money would have meant a fortune, never received the money.  The savings books accompanied them from orphanage to orphanage, but with the proviso that the savings could not be used until the children reached the age of 21.  But did they ever receive the money?  The answer remains unclear.

Thus there are three war children somewhere in the country who may well have been cheated out of considerable sums of money.  Only the researcher and those in charge of the archives know who they are.  But the way the rules governing personal privacy have been organized meant that the researcher was not permitted to investigate.  The law on public administration should surely protect the interests of these war children.  However, the way the law has been interpreted and applied means instead that a cover-up is provided for possible wrong-doing, or perhaps even a criminal act.

Borgersrud asks what the two examples may teach us.  The first involved powerful and influential pillars of society, who with their considerable leverage persuaded the Director General of The National Archives to invoke the law on public administration, and without due consideration of other factors, he did what they asked of him.  The outcome was that it was not be possible to reveal that important members of the Norwegian military establishment had chosen to switch their allegiance to the enemy.  The second example involves an infringement of rights, perhaps minor and perhaps of little importance, where lesser and weaker individuals were in a situation designed to protect them against themselves by the application of the rules on personal privacy.  In reality, however, it is the infringement itself that is being protected.  Do not these two cases reveal that striving to achieve neutrality in the protection of personal privacy accidentally disguises a conflict for the rights of different groups to assert their social legitimacy?

Thomas James Connors: Secrecy vs. Access

Thomas James Connors is attached to the University of Maryland, USA.  He calls his paper: Secrecy vs. Access – government information politics in the George W. Bush administration.

The paper’s topic is the information policy of the George W. Bush administration, in light of this conference’s theme of Power and Democracy.  He writes that his topic’s relevance to this theme has to do with how the Bush’ White House exercises power, how that exercise affects the operations of democratic government in the U.S., and how the free-flow – or not freeflow – of government information affects our democratic form of government in general, and what relation this has to the work of government archivists, records managers and information officers.

Connors sees the Bush’ information policy to be three-fold:

1. Its cornerstone is control of access to information – from imposing new limits and obstacles to gaining access to previously open information, to greater degrees of classification restriction, to outright refusal to divulge information when petitioned by Congress or private citizens.
2. A support aspect of this policy is personal information gathering.  This is done in the name of fighting what had been called the War on Terror, now called the Fight Against Extremism, but many see it as gathering information on the political opposition and dissenting Americans.
3. A third information policy strand is manipulating public information for blatantly partisan ends – this ranges from ideologically massaging the texts of policy reports with subtle changes in wording for a political effect, to conscious misinformation, to outright disinformation.

The unabridged article is available at:

Kaisa Maliniemi Lindbach: Archives and Minorities

Kaisa Maliniemi Lindbach is head of the project “Minority cultures in the public archives”.  In her article “Archives and Minorities” she discusses recent archival theories with particular regard tonational minorities in relation to the archives.

She points out that an archive is above all about documents.  These documents do not exist in isolation, but are influenced by a variety of circumstances – by the people who created them, by the players who have handled them, by the archivists who have collected and stored them, and by the researchers who have used them to construct our past.  At the same time it is important to highlight the position of the archivist in the different archival processes, especially today when electronic recording is becoming more common.

Because of the enormous quantities of existing documents, it is up to us to determine what is and what is not relevant.  The archives constitute the selective memory of the ruling power*.  The ruling power decides what should be stored in the archives and what is worth storing.  Thus the archival process is not objective but is serving the purposes of somebody.

In recent years two different trains of thought have dominated the archival sciences: the European course and the post-modernist course.  According to the Italian archival theorist Luciana Duranti, archival theories encompass thoughts on the character of the archival materials as it has developed over time and their encounter with different cultures with different documentation practicalities and legal contexts.  Archival theory constitutes the core of archival science.

Archival science also includes the principles and methods of controlling and preserving archival material (archival method), analysing archival concepts, principles and methods, and history associated with the ways in which they have been applied over time (archival practice).  According to Duranti, archival science may be defined as a system of theory, method, practice and knowledge.

The Canadian archival theorist Terry Cook has criticized Duranti for being too positivistic in her views on archival science.  According to him, she, like many other European archival theorists, sees archival science as being capable of universal application.  She believes in the objectivity of archival scientific investigation where archival science is regarded as a self-referencing system independent of the influences of political, legal and cultural concepts.  Terry Cook has a problem with Duranti’s attempt to consider archival science as having universal application comparable with the natural sciences.  For archival science to be an objective and universal science one would have to detach all humanist and historic relationships from the archival process, although these are strictly speaking part of it.

Linbach is of the view that both Duranti and Cook are correct but that they are discussing the specialist subject of archives from different angles.  In her discussion of archival science, Duranti sees the subject as a vocational/professional university subject in line with the view commonly held in many European countries.  In this kind of research project, the document itself and ways of archiving will form the central planks of investigation.  The archive as a documentary science will demand objectivity in a variety of ways.  Terry Cook, on the other hand, sees the specialist subject of archives as a humanities subject, where the archive as documentation forms only one part of a broader discourse on the specialist subject of archives.  Investigative projects of this nature will involve the researcher looking at the entire archival process, one that is also linked to different influences such as history, culture, society and man.  For a humanist subject where theory is based on philosophy it is difficult to arrive at a truth that has universal application.

Lindbach points out that the new challenges posed by modern society will force the archives to change.  People’s needs for information have altered as the world has become more media driven and individual personal rights have been strengthened.  In the last few years there has been an increase in applications to the archives for documentation from many groups, including gypsies, those previously brought up in children’s homes or attending state-run special needs schools, and children born illegitimately during the War to German soldiers and Norwegian mothers.   Many are seeking documentation to support their claims for compensation from the state for the deprivation or injustices they have suffered, although others only want to understand what happened.

It would seem that the next major cases for compensation will come from those who were deprived of appropriate education who are of Finnish stock,  are members of the Sàmi population, are one of the war children or are a gypsy.  These groups are included in the current national compensation arrangement.  During the Second World War, many schools in the northern counties of Troms and Finnmark were closed or burnt down.  Inadequate school provision, accompanied by a post-war policy of encouraging a single Norwegian culture meant that many children of Finnish or Sàmi background never learnt to read and write and have spent all their lives illiterate.  Many hundreds of them submitted individual equity claims during 1996-1997 but these were rejected because of a lack of documentation.

In order to obtain equity compensation, the claimants must submit supporting documentation.  In practice, however, this is often hard to provide since the relevant documents have not always been preserved, have been destroyed or have disappeared.  Central government has asked for inquiries to be made as to whether it is possible to document the loss of school provision from archival materials.  The concepts of both “minority” and “marginalization” can change; they may be based upon ethnicity, sex, social status, sexual orientation, illness, and other factors.  Marginalization means that the main culture or the dominant group (the centre) is shutting out sub-cultural and minority cultural groups; in other words these become marginal.

A good example of how notions of what constitutes “minority” and “marginalization” can change is found in the town of Porsanger.  During Autumn 2005, the exhibition “School in Porsanger - 100 years 1905-2005” was arranged jointly by the Intercommunal Archive Finnmark, Porsanger Museum and Porsanger Library.  One of the public’s most hotly debated topics was the loss of school provision as a consequence of the Second World War.  The Norwegian population felt they had been neglected by the authorities; they had not been able to seek compensation since their mother tongue was Norwegian.  The Sàmi population and persons of Finnish stock have been seen as having suffered greater injury because they did not learn the majority language.  According to the Norwegians, the conditions were the same for all ethnic groups in the area during the War, since all attended the same school, which was burnt down by the Germans.  The Norwegian children who suffered from inadequate provision of education thus belong to the minority because they are not benefiting from the same rights as those enjoyed by the area’s other ethnic groups. They have also been marginalized because they have not had the same level of school provision as the rest of the Norwegian population.  It may well be that the Norwegian children who were deprived of schooling following the burning of the schools in Finnmark will be able to seek compensation on an individual basis.

Arguing from a post-colonial approach, Lindbach stresses that an archive does not reflect absolute reality but rather is a construction reflecting the dominant power structure of a society.  An investigation of the minorities and marginal groups contained in the public archives would be an important component of the exposure of such power structures.

Even though the documents will have obvious historic and legal characteristics, the documents will also reveal what public policy, attitudes and prejudices were prevalent at a certain time and in a certain location.  The picture that emerges from the documents of society and its marginal groups could be at variance with the official version of history; they can tell another history, the story below.  One document from North Troms tells the following story:  “Racially, the population is heavily mixed with Finnish and Sàmi blood.  Not nearly enough has been done by the national authorities, by means of systematic school provision, to instil in the children a Norwegian mindset and disposition.  The majority of older people still speak Sàmi or Finnish.  One exception is the secondary modern school in Lyngseidet, created largely single-handedly by the head teacher Mr. Leigland, which has made a major contribution to erase racial differences.  It will only be a question of time until this racial division has disappeared.  The assimilation is under way.  As descendants of the number one sports nation in the world, the Finnish element brings a tough perseverance that does not give up after the first round.  The Sàmi element is, of course, more problematic since it will take more than one generation for a nomadic people to become permanent settlers.” (Circular, Restoration of North Troms, 1945)

Why is the term “Finnish”, rather than the Norwegian word “Kvensk”, meaning “of Finnish stock”, used in this text?  To analyze the text, Lindbach is of the view that the post-modern approach on its own is too generalizing.  Consequently, she applies post-colonial theories to help in the analysis of the ways that marginal groups are presented in the archives, and how their perspective emerges from these documents.

Henning Bender:  Danish foreign policy and labour protection

Henning Bender is the city archivist in Aalborg, Denmark.  His article relates from the Danish base at Thule in Greenland, where the Eskimos and Danish workers claimed to have been contaminated by radiation.  Bender recounts their struggle to obtain compensation, a story which is based on the handing over of the archives of the National Association of Radioactively Contaminated Workers of Thule to the Aalborg City Archives.

The workers of Thule maintained that they had been exposed to radiation from a crashed aeroplane carrying atomic weapons.  This was rejected by the Danish government which stated that no atomic weapons were stored on land in Greenland.  In the aftermath this statement could be said to be correct; what was involved were aeroplanes carrying atomic weapons flying over Greenland, one of which crashed into the sea.  The claims of the workers of Thule received little attention, but in 1995 it emerged that the Danish government had, in fact, permitted storage of atomic weapons in Thule and allowed flight and landing rights to the base of the aeroplanes carrying atomic weapons from 1957.  Consequently, a comprehensive hearing of the case was undertaken during October and November 1995, where the Folketing decided that every Thule worker still alive who had been present on the base on  21^st January, 1968 should receive an ex gratia payment of 50,000 Danish kroner.  It was stressed that the payment “did not imply acceptance of liability but constituted recompense for a long-standing, groundless fear of having been subjected to radiation”. 

Thereafter, the government closed the case for good.  This, however, did not pacify tempers; the workers of Thule put the case before the European court in 2002, with renewed demands to be tested for radiation contamination.  The case was turned down by the EU Commission on the grounds that Denmark had not been a member of the EU in 1968 and was thus not a party to the Euratom agreement on nuclear waste at the time, and furthermore that Greenland, self-governing since 1979, had left the European Union in 1986.

On 28^th September, 2005, the archives of the “National Association of  the Radioactively Contaminated Workers of Thule” were handed to Aalborg City Archive.  By handing the materials over to the City Archive, the association hoped to promote wider research into the case, helped by the recording and other processes in place in the City Archive.  The reason for choosing Aalborg City Archive is that the city has traditionally had close connections with Greenland.

It is, of course, not the task of the City Archive to determine the rights and wrongs of this long drawn-out compensation case.  It is, however, the job of the Archive to present the materials so as to make them available as widely as possible for research purposes.  This will, of course, be subject to the rules on access that apply to such materials.  Most importantly, however, the archive will, with effect from 21^st January 2006, the 38^th anniversary of the plane crash, be available through a link at www.aalborg.dk/stadsarkiv and will later be available at www.danpa.dk and www.noks.dk .

Karin Gjelsten: Digitized public institutions – democratization or mounting barriers?

Karin Gjelsten from Bergen City Archive has written the article “Digitized public institutions – democratization or mounting barriers?: What are the new challenges facing archive personnel?

Gjelsten writes that, with ever more information being made available on the Internet by public bodies, greater demands are made on the expertise of the users to access the materials.  The use of electronic communication requires high ethical standards on the part of archive personnel, who are not always aware of the extent of their potential power in administering the information contained in the archives.

The writer asks: “Do digitized public bodies lead to greater democracy or to mounting barriers?”  In her view it could be said to lead to increased democratization and openness for those who are already skilled operators of the electronic medium, those with adequate competence in gaining access.  Some may perhaps hesitate to communicate with public institutions when realizing that their name will be added to the public internet log if they write a letter to a central or local government institution.  The latter have a great responsibility for ensuring that cases that are not in the public domain are protected and that adequate processes in place for quality assurance, reducing the potential for human error to a minimum.

The digitization of information in the public domain and the creation of electronic access to it will have consequences.  We should be aware of these and take appropriate steps to deal with them.  In the writer’s view, the most important challenges involve the following:

1. The users require adequate competence for gaining access in order to communicate with public bodies.
2. Archival personnel in the centralized daily archives will have more power.  They control all information, a factor which imposes strict requirements on those applying to work in the archives.
3. Electronic archives will ensure that information is not lost, so long as recognized and standardized solutions are used.
4. The selection of technological solutions is critical both for the users and for preservation.  It is clear that new categories of classification are emerging.  The beginnings of new groupings with a new kind of power and with high competence in accessing information is discernible.

The result has been more openness and greater democracy for certain groups of the population.  The new classification categories have meant that new and greater inequalities have arisen.  Most larger organizations are now carrying out daily archival services through larger, centralized units, as for example the Central Archive of the municipality of Bergen.  Being freed from departmental leadership also means being freed from decisions taken at that level as to what should be made public, be recorded or stored in the archives.

Consequently, the new role of the archivist will be to adopt a neutral relationship with the current legal framework and not with a changing level of leadership which is guarding its own interests. It could be said that archivists in many ways will become the guardians of democracy.  As professional archivists, we share a responsibility to meet the above challenges relating to ethics, technical solutions and accessibility for all!

Ellen Røsjø: The Archive as a societal institution

Observer or participant?

We should not pretend that archival institutions have a role as observers, writes Ellen Røsjø of the Oslo City Archive.  We are a part of central or local government which represents those in power and the values that govern at a given time.   Yet we do have a particular role since we administer materials which show how such values change over time.  We should accept responsibility as societal institutions, in the sense of taking responsibility for ensuring that the documentation covering our collective memory is as comprehensive as possible.  We must realize that we are constantly making choices, which means that we are also automatically rejecting certain information.  We should ask ourselves questions such as, “What are we keeping – and for whom?  Who are capable of using us?”

Ellen Røsjø argues that the archives must show themselves to be open; its users should mirror the broad spectrum of the population.  To achieve this, more services should be offered to for example immigrants and those from a multicultural background, by making available archival materials that are relevant to them and come from their environment. In particular, we should be encouraging school children to use the archives, either online or inviting them to visit an archive and find out about primary sources.  This would, of course, also be in line with the recommendations in the school curriculum.  In addition, they should learn about our type of institution, and that everybody has a democratic right to use it.  A large part of school children in Oslo – 35% - come from a minority culture.  To expand our horizon, we should open up and display our institutions in a variety of ways.  We should introduce ourselves and some of the materials we administer online, create exhibitions displaying different facets of our society, produce documentation, and encourage debate on a range topics.

In her presentation, Ellen Røsjø gave an account of the films of Oslo that have been made available on DVD.  These are old films of the city that the City Archive has adapted and are now available to anyone interested.

 Access to materials covered by rules of confidentiality – an account by The National Archives

The report ends with an account by The National Archives, an institution criticized by the historians Westlie and Borgersrud.  The National Archives point out that the criteria determining what constitutes personal privacy can vary from country to country, often associated with an historical or a general societal context.  There are many different interpretations and rules on how long different types of information should be protected against free access, and there are also different regulations governing when and how a public organization may be allowed to make exceptions to its duty of protecting information.

The regulations in place in Norway could be said to be fairly non-specific in two ways.  Firstly, little guidance is provided of what should be regarded as personal information covered by rules of silence; it is left to the individual public organisation to use its own judgement,  Secondly, the period of protection, with some exceptions, has been set summarily, with 60 years as a general rule.

One major aspect of the Norwegian regulations is clearly distinguishable from that of most other countries; there is an emphatic difference between the opportunity of using materials covered by rules of silence for purposes of research on the one hand, and wider use of such information on the other.  Explicit opportunity is given for exemption from the rules of silence in order to make information covered by such rules available for research purposes.  However, the researcher, too, has a duty of protecting the information permitting the identification of a person from being passed to others.

The National Archival Services of Norway (Arkivverket) receives around 2,000 requests each year for access to documents that are covered by rules of confidentiality, and of these almost 1,000 apply to materials held by The National Archives.  More than half of the requests relate to partial access in one form or another.  Most of these can be met, but sometimes it is necessary to find ways around particular problems.  Often a file will contain information of a confidential nature about other people; typically this may be information on other members of the same family, for example siblings.  On rare occasions it is necessary to consider whether the information sought may be of a stressful nature to the person involved, or whether the information could have a deleterious effect on the person’s relationship to those close to him or her.  This so-called “criterion of prudence” is a part of the system of both the Public Administration Act, the Personal Data Act and of the legal framework governing the health service. 

The other large group of requests for access involves research purposes of many different types.  Almost all requests from qualified researchers are granted.  Sometimes, however, it is necessary to clarify whether the applicant does, in fact, possess the qualifications necessary for being granted access, and even whether or not the stated research project exists.

In total, the National Archives of Norway and the state archives annually grant access to 90% of the applications received.  For the remainder, efforts are always made to find solutions that are satisfactory to the applicant.  Sometimes it is not the whole document that is covered by the rules of confidentiality and it may be possible to provide adapted copies, or perhaps provide only the particular information the applicant is seeking.

 Any decision made not to grant access is an administrative resolution which may be appealed against.  Over the past 20-25 years, the appeals made to the Ministry have numbered well under one case per year.  For most of the appeals the decision reached by the Director General of The National Archives has been upheld by the Ministry.  Overall, it would be reasonable to conclude that the system is functioning well.

No one should doubt that that the regulations limiting the rights of access are not created to protect the public organizations, or the individual employees of the organization, against attention or criticism levelled at them for the actions they carry out or the decisions they make as part of their public duty.