Det som blev kvar : Analoga fonogram som dokument och deras roll, funktion och värde i arkivet

What remains after digitalization? Audio-visual documents are today at risk of deteriorating because of the fragilematerial they consist of, and although the process of transferring the information onto a digital format is oftenused to preserve the data they contain, the question of what becomes of the remaining analogue data carrier isnot raised in modern research.This thesis has examined how old and fragile sound recordings are kept and managed in an archive afterthey have been digitized. A case study was used to investigate how an archival institution view the remainingdata carriers and what becomes of them today when the information they carry is available on another format.The fragility of the recording was of importance for the study, because it means that it is not possible to play iton an analogue play back device without damaging it, and its status as an archival document can be questioned.The archive which this thesis investigated consisted of the Institute for Languages and Folklore in Uppsala,Sweden, which houses a great deal of old and fragile sound recordings which were collected on a phonograph asearly as 1896. This makes these recordings the oldest ones in Sweden that has been collected for recordkeepingpurposes. By examining the role, function and value of the recordings, this study investigated whether they holdan importance for the archive as historical objects, or as functional documents. The study consisted of a triangulationmethod, where interviews, a document analysis as well as an object biography method were combined tocompare and analyze the empirical findings in conjunction with each other. The results indicated that althoughsome documental properties still existed, the old sound recordings kept in the archive were mostly seen as historicalobjects. However, a theoretical analysis indicated that the recordings could be seen as a hybrid of both documentand artefact. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science.