Personal archives are a largely neglected subject in archival theory. Among the consequences of this is the absenceof any general established or formalized practices when it comes to arrangement and description. Thisstudy opposes the notion that an archival institution without formal systems of arrangement and description doesnot order and describe archives in accordance with a general conceptual framework of a correct order. Supportingitself on the anthropological theory of Mary Douglas on dirt and cleanliness, it studies the implicit notions oforder that can be found in the archival descriptions of the personal archives kept by the Swedish national archives.Several patterns where revealed by the study: among them the primacy of quantity stood out. The vaguesystem of categories based on Martin Grass description model appears only to be employed loyally where quantitiesof the particular categories are such that they constitute complete volumes, which seem to be the cardinaljustifier of categorical division within the archive. The model itself is rarely applied with orthodoxy, and itsroughness often means that the categories engage in “border clashes” over which documents belong in whichcategory. Though these are often caused and generally determined by quantities, they also reveal an internalhierarchy of relations between specific types of records and categories. Furthermore, certain categories appearsmore stable than others, and when Grass system collapses, it reveals how certain of them – based on a principleof pertinence or theme – habitually fall out of use whereas categories defined by document types appear to remainfar more stable even in smaller archives and archives with low degree of differentiation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-253299 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Frölander, John |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för ABM |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Uppsatser inom arkivvetenskap, 1651-6087 ; 134 |
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