The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Ann-Sofie Klareld, whose interest is in the Swedish initiative to invest in the development of a national archives search engine. Her Arkiv project is interested in technologies for accessing archives, and their intentions. Archives are often seen as lying dormant: they are available, but not necessarily very visible or widely used. Technology is being used to remedy this and make archives more accessible.
Search engines are one such technology: they can make archives considerably more accessible, but archival search also differs from Web search, as the provenance of the archival materials is far more important; archival materials are organised by the specific archival collections they belong to. Such collections also often do not exist in digital formats, of course.
The Swedish National Archives Database was developed some time ago to make national archives more accessible, but have long lacked support funding. This has changed recently, with an initiative to develop this into a national research infrastructure. Rather than offering individual document images, the content itself is now intended to be made searchable. This will also involve AI integration, with testing of various approaches currently underway. This also requires imagination about how such a service might eventually be used.
How are the needs and expectations of users being considered in this development process, then, and what visions for the use of this database exist? This takes an information as potentiality approach, which imagines new opportunities to use these archival holdings; potentiality emerges through the design of such information environments, and can lead to the development of more fulfilling environments.
The approach of the research project here is on policy analysis and the study of the debates surrounding the database project, also including interviews with the development team. This uses Bacchi’s approach to the study of how policies define problems and solutions; it asks about problem representations, the assumptions they imply, and what effects are being envisaged here.
