Att bevara för att använda? : Om användares och användninges betydelse i arkivet

Sammanfattning: In times of increasing demands of access and use of records and archives, among the current political and private initiatives of both efficiency and innovation, and among developments of e-services and digitalization, new participatory initiatives are created. In the current times, as both users and potential users are gaining bigger roles as co-creators of records, it sets new demands on how these participatory perspectives could be contextualized in the archival practice.The aim of the thesis was to extend the knowledge of users, use of archives and archival records. Presented in the thesis, several studies have been conducted with the purpose of exploring how users and use are described in the literature of archival science, how use have been considered by different professions when analogue processes turn digital, and exploring what dictates the need of use. The studies have had a qualitative stance where the methods of data collection have consisted of interviews and a group interview, a focus group, a systematic literature review, and a participatory observation.The results show that the development of e-services is based on the need of the end-users/customers and that there is a risk that the role of the archival profession may disappear behind political incentives. Results also show that ‘user’ is a concept that is utterly bound to the heterogeneous contexts in which they are conceptualized, and that the user studies conducted within the archival domain elucidates the importance of gaining knowledge of the users’ perception and behavior. The thesis also shows that the concept of societal embeddedness as an analytical tool can be used to visualize the need of use of records. This can be used as a way to describe and contextualize the user perspective in a broader societal context.