European Standards Map

Sweden

EMII gratefully acknowledges the help of the following people in Sweden:

Erik Åstrom, Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs
Bengt Wittgren, Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs

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National Overview

The ICOM definition of museum serves as the national definition of museum in Sweden:

"A museum is a non-profitmaking, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of man and his environment"

In addition, the institution must have at least one full time, paid and qualified museum curator. There is no single legislative act governing the activities of Swedish museums. The partner estimated that 100% of Swedish museums comply with the ICOM Code of Professional Ethics

The total number of museums in Sweden is estimated at 197 with collections totalling an estimated 12,867,000 objects. The ratio of public museums versus private owned and run museums is 176 to 21. There is no organisation responsible for co-ordinating museum documentation witin Sweden.

Public museums can be defined as:

'Those with public insight into their activities, finaced by the state, the county council or the municipality. ' The definition is based on legislation for public organizations.

And private museums as: 'Those with public insight into their activities, finaced by the state, the county council or the municipality. '

Categories of Public Museums

Categories of Private Museums

Sources: Published statistics from "Statistics Sweden" (Statistiska Centralbyrån), The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs (Kulturrådet): Museums and Art Galleries 1998 (ISBN 91-85603-19-8) and Swedish Agency for Administrative Development (Statskontoret): SESAM Öppnde museisamlingarna (ISBN 91-7220-361-7). And unpublished, from Kulturrådet: Samlingarnas långsiktiga bevarande - Long-term aspects of Museum Collections (1999).

Partners Comment: There have been several studies and investigations to, among other tasks, count the number of the museum objects. To speed up the work with collections management and conservation the Government initiated the project SESAM. The project ended in 1998 and used 235 million SEK, about 15,900,000 EURO.

Employment

In 1998 an estimated 4815 man-years work was undertaken in Swedish museums. Due to the statistical method employed in Sweden it is not possible to break this down into part time and full time employment. The trade union does not accept voluntary or unpaid staff with the exception of museum studies students, an extremely marginal element. The statistical sample includes agreements on a national level between the union and museums which prevent employment of volunteers or unqualified curators.

Information Management

Percentage of cultural heritage held in Museums that is:

For documented collections, what percentage is:

(1) To national minimum standard where one exists or international alternative. (2) Catalogued beyond national minimum standard.

131 museums record information digitally all of which is held in institutional databases. The national guidelines for manual and digital registration and documentation are SAMOREG used by almost all cultural history museums. During the last 10 years supplementary guidelines have been developed including object name lists, documentation guidelines and guidelines on authority list use. For details see www.insam.mus.org/standard

Images and Multimedia

10 Swedish museums have published a total of 30 CD-Roms. A further 50 have interactive gallery systems.

Percentage of museums with digital images of all or part of their collections:

Digital images were produced for the following purposes:

Partners Comment: A lot of museums scan pictures, but only for in house use.

Museums and the Internet

It is estimated that 190 museums have Internet access for Web browsing and email. 150 have Web sites of which 100 are purely brochureware, 80 include some educational content and 15 contain collections databases. A total of 30 museums are planning to go on-line by December 2000.

Partners Comment: All public museums have been offered a 2 Mbit (at least) Internet line for free by the national government. Some have used that offer, some uses other partners, for example local governments or the municipality.

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International, National and Regional Initiatives

We asked partners to describe current or recently completed international initiatives to facilitate remote access to cultual hertiage information. These can include participation in professional working groups and other EC funded projects.

• Initiative details

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Procedural Standards

Swedish collections management standards have been developed over the last 25 years building on the traditional museum procedures. With the onset of increased digitisation Swedish museums collaborated to develop a new national collections management standard called SAMOREG. This standard is in use in 150 museums and covers approximately 10,000,000 objects mostly at regional and local museums.

We also asked what Collections Management Software is in use:

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Information Management Standards

We asked about:

• Content and Resource description standards including term lists, Classification Syatems and Thesauri
• Content and Structure Description Standards
• Technological Standards and Protocols

Content and Resource Description Standards

There are two types of term list developed for classification and/or description in widespread use: one for image description, and one for cultural history collections.

Term lists in use include:

• Fotoraadets termlistor, 'The Swedish Photo Councils term lists' with 3,000 terms in use in 20 museums
• Nordiska museets termlista with 1,500 cultural history terms in use in 100 museums applied to 1,000,000 objects
• Sofies termlista (term list in a digital documentation system) with 2,000 cultural history terms in use in 100 museums applied to 1,000,000 objects

Classification systems in use include:

• Vocabulary of Basic Terms for Cataloguing Costume, ICOM Costume Committee used by the Nordiska musets collection of costumes with a collection of 20,000 objects.
• Outline of World Cultures part of Human Relations Area File in use in 2 Ethnographical collections of an estimated 170,000 objects.
• Outline of Cultural Materials with 900 terms used in 200 museums totalling 8,000,000 cultural history and photographic collections.

See: http://www.insam.mus.org/auktoriteter/index.html

Thesauri are not in widespread use in Sweden. In 1994 INSAM invited a representative of the Getty vocabularly program for a tour to introduce AAT. Some interest was expressed at the time but until recently this has not been taken forward. 20 museums use the Thesaurus of Geographic Names [TGN] and 14 use the Union list of Artists Names [ULAN].

Content and Structure Description Standards

Data content standards include SCB-kod used by 150 museums to connect collections with topographical resources. This is a topographical standard made by the national organisation for statistics in Sweden and used to describe the older counties in Sweden.

Technological Standards and Protocols

The Swedish wing of ISO, SIS (Standardiseringen i Sverige/ Swedish Institute for Standards, www.sis.se) develops and publishes standards in use in Sweden. Some of these standards are incorporated in SAMOREG. In terms of metadata standards for resource discovery the national project SAMSOEK has tested Dublin Core.

The MARC format is used in 25 museums for bibliographic dscription and ISAD G and ISAAR (CPF) are used by 2 museums for archive description. In addition the respondent noted that there is a national database for libraries which all public museums can affiliate to. This is a MARC based system which communicates by Z39.50.

The following data presenation and encoding standards are in use:

Z39.50 is employed in 10 museums and HTTP/CGI in 5.

Technical standards for the protection of Intellectual Property are not in use. An explanation for this is the view that protection against copyright infringement does not need to be controlled in a technical way as the material in question already resides in the public domain the normal channels can be pursued if necessary. The Swedish Photograph Council has carried out some digital watermark trails.

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Future Vision

The Swedish response to our question:

'Please use this space to describe ways in which you consider EMII should develop to provide a value added resource to museums in your country. Feel free to address any aspect of our current remit or to propose new roles. You may be as detailed as you like and include references to publications, Web sites, iniatives etc. Whilst we are developing our vision for EMII's future activities we also want to ensure that we capture your needs and concerns.'

In Sweden there is no equivalent institution to the UK's mda with responsibility for co-ordinating and disseminating information on cultural heritage information management standards. Because of this the Swedish national body requires an organisation at European level to act as a centre for development and research. During 1990 to 1999 Sweden had a national organisation for documentation and ICT : INSAM, the only international co-operation body for that was CIDOC. Good, but not as stable as an institution like a European mda.

Important projects in the EMII sphere from a Swedish point of view:

• co-ordinate the development of a European multilingual (co-operative made) Glossary for Documentation.
• co-ordinate the development of a European multilingual (co-operative made) minimum standard for Collections Management like Spectrum.
• A co-ordinating person or a group of people in European regions for network building.
• co-ordinate and connect to national projects or regional projects. A web builder.

It is important that the development work can be assisted by education in every country. The model could be a centre for education in best practice, documentation theory and research. The three parts: practice, education and research, need to be connected.

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Funded by the European Commission -Education and Culture Directorate-General - Raphaël Programme

Created on 14 July 2000