Majority and minority perspectives in archives selection and preservation

What is it about?

We asked in 2004: Where are the immigrants own voices, own perspectives and thoughts in our archives? We can find immigrants “counted” in statistics and censuses and in the files of social services and immigrant authorities. But the perspective is the one of the civil servant - not the immigrant’s own. To find that you must search carefully and even if it exists in letters it may not be registered and found very easily. We had 330 registered ethnic and multicultural organizations in Oslo. Which traces of their activities will be preserved here in 100 years we asked? We argued therefore that we should invite the immigrant population so as to become part of our collective memory. Oslo City Archives therefore conducted a project called Oslo Multicultural Archives in 2004 - 2007. The purpose of the project was to collect, preserve and make available a number of key archives from new minorities in Oslo. The aim was that Oslo City's cultural diversity should thus become part of the city's memory and could be used in our outreach work. The article examines the content of public agencies’ records that dealt with immigrant organizations and compare these public records with the private records we had collected. Key questions were: What do public and private archives, respectively, document? Which voices can be found in these public records from new minorities? Which perspective does the government have on minorities? What do private archives document about minorities?

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