Samdok - Nordiska museet

Opening and welcome addresses
The Swedish Samdok network
Eva Fägerborg
Samdok Secretariat, Nordiska Museet
It is a great pleasure to see you all here, and I am glad to
convey greetings from colleagues from other countries,
in different parts of the world, who have taken an interest
in the conference but could not attend.
With increasing awareness of the power of cultural
heritage, museums as creators of cultural heritage are
now intensely debated as actors in society. They are producers
of images of reality that are exhibited, preserved
and stored in artefact collections and archives. This
forces museum professionals to reflect continuously on
the impact and consequences of their work. In Sweden,
Samdok – the cultural history museums’ network for
contemporary studies and collecting – is a forum for
such reflections and discussions. In the latest issue (no
2, 2007) of our periodical Samtid & museer, also available
on-line, you will find a more detailed presentation; here I
shall just give a brief orientation about our work.
Samdok currently has about 80 members – county
museums, municipal museums, central museums, specialist
museums, along with some other institutions. The
members get together in working groups, known as pools,
and the core of Samdok work is the studies and collection
carried on in the pools by the respective museums.
The work is supported by the Samdok Secretariat located
at the Nordiska Museet, the Samdok Council with
representatives of different kinds of museums, and the
Research Council which is integrated in the Nordiska
Museet’s Research Council.
The pool system is perhaps the best-known char-
acteristic of Samdok. In eight groups, representatives
from the member museums meet regularly around contemporary
issues and the task of investigating and collecting
material concerning contemporary phenomena.
The pools ventilate museum projects, theoretical, methodological
and ethical questions; they invite researchers
from universities, organize field seminars and study visits.
These recurrent meetings give museum professionals
specific opportunities to develop their work mutually.
I wish to emphasize that Samdok is not a unit or a
centralized body, it is its members. And the Samdok family
is a heterogeneous crowd of museums with different
aims and directions, different needs, competences and
working conditions.
What is common is the mission to contribute to a
deeper understanding of human beings, of people in society,
through contemporary studies and collecting. In
Samdok, the focus is on people’s lives, activities, experiences,
conditions and values related to time, space and
social contexts.
Generally speaking, museum collecting is a matter of
exploring relations between human beings and objects,
settings and issues/phenomena in society and creating
material that can be useful for many purposes. Museums
apply various collecting methods and perspectives,
depending on the aims in the specific cases. Within
Samdok, the acquisition of objects is mostly a part of the
ethnographic fieldwork, with the research questions as
the guide to the choice of objects. This contextual col-
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