THE NATIONAL ARCHIVE
OUR NATION'S MEMORY
Can you imagine all the documents, the reports and case settings that are made during a day in all corners of the nation's bureaucracies? Can you imagine the amount of documents when the week, month and year are over?
For more than two hundred years, the national archivist has ensured that all documents are archived according to strict rules, and the Public Information Act requires that everything can be retrieved. In 2021, 70 km of new shelf space was put into use inside a mountain hall that is next door to the National Library's formidable archive in Mo i Rana.
70,000 shelf meters are prepared for our common memory
The collaboration between the National Archives and the National Library has been going on for a long time. Already in 2017, the first lorries arrived in Mo i Rana with archive material from the full magazines in Hamar and in Oslo. It will take some time before all seventy kilometers of shelf space are occupied, but there are already plans to double the number of shelf meters in the mountain of Mo i Rana.
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If you want to extract information from the archive, you will have access via the Digital Archive's website. There are already more than 1.6 million unique users, in other words one of the country's most visited websites.
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To make the documents accessible and readable on your PC, the documents have been scanned and digitized by the National Library's skilled professionals.
One of the largest sub-archives at the National Archives is the treason archive after World War II. This important part of Norway's history includes more than 90,000 treason cases and approx. 350 war crimes cases. The material amounts to a total of more than 1200 shelf meters, and the entire archive is stored for posterity in the specially built halls in Mofjellet.
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The National Archives have a desire to facilitate for the public digital use of the archive. When someone contacts the National Archives and asks to see something from the archives, the staff will digitize what is not already available in the Digital Archive. The National Archives is at the forefront of digitalisation, and the department in Mo i Rana will be important in improving services for users.
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Brief facts about the National Archives
The National Archives is the nation's memory and has preserved Norway's history for 200 years.
The National Archives has the country's oldest document from 1189, and an innovation lab that works with artificial intelligence.
Digitizing and making the archives accessible to everyone is at the top of the National Archives' work list.
The National Archives has over 270,000 shelf meters of historical data, 6.5 million images and 24,000 audio recordings.
The National Archives has archives about property, health, relatives, history, child welfare, school, immigration, the judiciary, gender equality, the Middle Ages, to name a few, in addition to archives by organizations, companies and private individuals.
The National Archives has 10 office locations and just over 300 employees. The agency is subordinate to the Ministry of Culture and Gender Equality.
The National Archives' new magazine hall for paper archives is co-located with the National Library in the existing mountain facility in Mo.
At the Digital Archive you will find a lot about most things
If you want to know more about our common memory, check the National Archives' website