High hopes for the investment in the National Archives Database

The Swedish National Archives has been awarded SEK 46.4 million by the Swedish Research Council to develop the National Archives Database (NAD) into a national research infrastructure over the next five years. One of the people who will play an important role in this work is SND’s Director, Eva Stensköld. Since early June, she has chaired NAD’s newly appointed steering committee. 

The purpose of the investment in NAD is to make Sweden’s extensive archive collections more accessible as digital, searchable, and machine-readable research data. This means that historical archives will be transformed from document images that are difficult to search into searchable and analysable research resources. Together, the Swedish National Archives and the Swedish Research Council are investing more than SEK 90 million in the project. The funding will be used for technical equipment, application development, specialist competence, and user support, among other things.  

“An encouraging investment” 

“This investment is encouraging both for the research community and for the development of Sweden’s research infrastructure landscape. Through NAD, a very extensive body of archival material will become available as structured and machine-readable data. Together with the Swedish National Archives’ work to develop its own language and AI models, such as The Swedish Lion, this will open up new opportunities for researchers to search, interpret, and analyse historical sources on a scale that has not previously been possible,” says Eva Stensköld. 

The practical benefits for researchers include: 

• Large volumes of historical archival material will become searchable, including handwritten documents that have previously been difficult to analyse at scale. 
• AI-based tools and transcriptions will make it possible to process and analyse much larger datasets than before. 
• Archival material will be made available as structured data, facilitating quantitative analyses, text analyses, and digital humanities research. 
• The infrastructure will create new opportunities for interdisciplinary research in areas such as history, social sciences, linguistics, and demography. 

Strong interest from other actors 

There is already considerable interest in the further development of NAD. The Swedish National Archives has received many questions about use, collaboration, and training opportunities. One of the steering committee’s first tasks will therefore be to support the Swedish National Archives in developing guidelines and processes that make it possible to prioritize among the requests. Another discussion of relevance to SND is the possibility of the Swedish National Archives eventually becoming a member of the SND Network. 

“We have been in dialogue about this for some time, and we hope that the funding granted to NAD will create an opportunity for this kind of development,” says Eva Stensköld. 

Read more about the investment in NAD on the Swedish National Archives website (in Swedish).