Roswitha Skare

• Professor (Full) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Introduction. This study is the first to explore how public library services for migrants are prioritised in national government policies across eight European countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Sweden.Method.Using a comparative case study approach, the study analyses national library and immigration policy d...

The Handbook on Information Sciences provides a comprehensive overview of the core themes within the discipline, including the organisation of information and how to manage data, and outlines avenues for future research. Discussions on the methodological evolution of the field are enriched by an in-depth evaluation of the use of experimental method...

This article examines the future challenges facing Norwegian public libraries in light of legislative changes and evolving societal needs. Since the Public Library Act of 1986, with updates in 2014, libraries are mandated to be accessible cultural and educational centers. The 2019 national library strategy further emphasizes their role in public en...

Public librarians in Hungary and Poland began coordinating and preparing response efforts even before Ukrainians fleeing the outbreak of war arrived in their countries. This was just the beginning of their impressive work. Read more about the remarkable response efforts by library professionals in these two countries in our newly published article.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to show that the neo-documentary – or complimentary – approach in Library and Information Science by no means is conservative, but highly necessary also in today's digitized media landscape. An example from a digitized photo archive is chosen to demonstrate the importance of a complimentary analysis that conside...

Through this examination of trends in outdoor oriented librarianship in Norway and in the United States we see both similarities and differences. In both countries we see efforts focused on promoting reading outdoors. We also see efforts in both countries to take the library outside, thus perhaps ensuring the library’s continued visibility and rele...

Public libraries have played a central role in natural disasters such as the tornado in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004/2005 and the tsunami in the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011, but also in the financial crisis from 2008. While public libraries in these crises took on a very active role in providing shelter and infrastructure for their citizens, healt...

Purpose In museum research, museums are held as vital in maintaining the public sphere. This scoping review takes stock of the present status of museum–public sphere research by providing an overview of the existing literature as a point of departure for future research. In short, it maps the research aims, theoretical concepts, research methods an...

The Covid-19 pandemic caused a lockdown of public libraries’ buildings in Norway in March 2020 as was the case in almost every other European country. This article investigates the situation for the public library in Tromsø in the period from 12 March 2020 and towards a gradual reopening of the library building to the public in April the same year....

Purpose The purpose of this study is to provide a discussion on how to apply Genette's concept of the paratext to analyze digital documents. The article argues that the concept, despite its shortcomings, is useful because it gives us the terminology to analyze elements often ignored and overlooked. Design/methodology/approach By taking Gérard Gene...

The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling – Statens senter for arkiv, bibliotek og museum) existed between 2003 and 2010. This article raises the question of why ABM-utvikling was not continued as a cultural policy instrument for the LAM sector. The new body for LAM policy development was based on the notion of converging m...

This article presents Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext by defining the term and by describing its characteristics. The use of the concept in disciplines other than literary studies and for media other than printed books is discussed. The last section shows the relevance of the concept for library and information science in general and for k...

Scandinavian airlines (SAS) published a video (2:43 minutes long) under the title “What is truly Scandinavian?” on February 11th, 2020 at the company’s social media sites. The ad was removed later that day, and a new and shorter version was published the day after. This paper takes a closer look on the video and the reactions on it. By focusing on...

This paper presents and discusses a historical institutional framework for studying institutional change processes in library, archive & museum institutions. A limited application of this framework is applied to the case of modern public libraries in Norway and Sweden, for illustra¬tive purposes. We conducted a literature review on institutional an...

LAM institutional convergence and divergence in Norwegian cultural policy The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM-utvikling – Statens senter for arkiv, bibliotek og museum) existed between 2003 and 2010. This article raises the question of why ABM-utvikling was not continued as a cultural policy instrument for the LAM sector. The...

In his study, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation , the French literature scholar Gérard Genette introduces the concept of the “paratext” to the public. Genette explains the term paratext as that “what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (Genette 1997, 1). Genette’s concep...

It is common in the literature to see libraries characterized as public sphere institutions, but the exact processes by which libraries support and engage in the public sphere remain under-explored. Based on a systematic review of the research literature on libraries as public sphere institutions, this study maps the questions, methods, theories, a...

Verdensteatret åpnet sine dører sommeren 1916 og er i dag Norges eldste kinobygg som fortsatt brukes for å vise film. Vi vet om åpningsforestillingen den 4. juni 1916 at det svenske melodramaet Madame de Thebes Spaadom fra 1915, med norsk tittel Skjæbnens Søn, står på programmet og at Bladet Tromsø kunne fortelle om lange køer. Likevel vet vi svært...

Historically, archives, libraries and museums (ALM) have been perceived as institutions providing infrastructure for an open and enlightened public discourse. The Norwegian Public Libraries Act focuses on public libraries being providers of knowledge and cultural expressions, agents of popular enlightenment, local meeting places and arenas of debat...

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose c...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion on whether more traditional documents like a film of the classical silent era can be discussed as an unbounded document. Design/methodology/approach By taking Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext as point of departure and focussing on the exhibition of Nanook of the North during the...

Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North is one of the best-known documentaries of the silent era and has remained well-known throughout the world ever since its release in 1922. This study takes as its point of departure the changes Nanook underwent from its premiere at the New York Capitol on June 11, 1922, to the sound version of 1947, the film's r...

The notion of authenticity seems to have grown more and more important for artistic documents during the last decades. Critics are using the term as a kind of distinction; an authentic novel or film is a good novel or film. Authenticity in these cases does not mean questioning the novel or film as an original work of art; rather, what is meant by a...

Robert J. Flaherty is today best known for his films, and especially for his first film Nanook of the North (1922). In discussions about the early years of Flaherty’s career there has been much emphasis on Flaherty as a man with little formal education, a self- made man and an explorer. Flaherty’s statement “First I was an explorer; then I was an a...

Facebook (FB) has since its birth in 2004 as a site for students on Harvard campus grown to become one of the largest site on the net at all, both when it comes to writers and readers across ages, genders, cultures and continents and one may wonder if FB is a document without borders at all and if it is a book as it claims in its name. We will try...

div> The Life of Others (2006) has been a successful film, winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Feature in 2007. It is a film about surveillance, but also about the lives of artists and writers in East Berlin in the middle of the 1980s, and about what role literature and art played in the GDR and in the events of autumn 1989. The article focuses on t...

The article starts with the film's premiere in New York in 1922. With help of 2 cuesheets - probably compiled in 1922 - the music of one scene ("Winter") is examined, before the article takes a look into 2 original scores composed by Stanley Silvermanand Timothy Brock for either VHS or DVD editions of the film. It turns out that these original scor...

This article discusses the importance of paratext for the reception of the German film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) as authentic and as a credible representation of historical events. It aims to show that authenticity is not necessarily just an objective category that can be verified, but also a subjective feeling that arises w...

Since the German reunification biographical, personal identities and various forms of collective identity have become the focus of increased attention. However, the ways in which identity is constructed and which role various forms of representation play in this construction has remained surprisingly underresearched. Using the example of Kerstin He...

In film history Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is usually considered the first documentary and possibly one of the best known documentaries of the silent era. It has also been called the first ethnographic film, as well as the first art film. However, this paper will not discuss the question of whether Nanook is a documentary, rather...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a discussion on the concept of complementarity and to show how it can work in a concrete document analysis. Design/methodology/approach – Starting out with the question of whether it is correct to refer to Bohr's principle of complementarity in the field of document analysis, the paper discusses li...

The notion of text has a long tradition inside the human science. A broad definition of this concept considers all man-made products as systems of signs and thereby as texts; but often not “as the physical manifestation as such, but as the abstract representation of a work” (Gunder: 2001, 86). Considering that everything – including sculpture, musi...

Christa Wolf’s Sommerstück was published in March 1989, just in time to celebrate the 60th birthday of the author in both East and West Germany. In the years after 1989, different paperback editions followed. Interesting to note is that pictures by Hartwig Hamer were included only in the original edition by Aufbau. Accordingly, I would like to focu...

Beginning with a short review of West German accounts prior to 1989 of GDR literary history and the present discussion about the changing treatment of it, five new historical works discussing German literary history (and GDR literature) since 1945 are presented. The authors' intentions and their practical conversion, as well as the difficulties tha...

Beginning with a short review about the question of East-German identity, texts by Daniela Dahn, Thomas Rosenlöcher and Hans-J. Misselwitz are analysed to show how history is recounted through stories. Despite the authors’ different biographical backgrounds and their varying literary styles, the three chosen texts have two things in common: the cen...

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Beitrages steht Grit Poppes Debütroman "Andere Umstände" (1995), in dem die Geschichte einer mordenden jungen Frau in der DDR der 80er Jahre erzählt wird. Anhand der zahlreichen Anspielungen im Roman wird gezeigt, daß es sich bei Andere Umstände keineswegs um einen "klassischen" Kriminalroman handelt, sondern vielmehr um eine...

Paper presented at DOCAM ’06, University of California, Berkeley, October 13-15, 2006

In: Roswitha Skare, Niels Windfeld Lund, Andreas Vårheim (eds.) (2007): "A Document (Re)turn". Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,pp. 135-151 Reprinted with permission.

Christa Wolf – one of the most famous East German writers – published a little story called What remains in the summer of 1990. Written in the late seventies under the GDR regime but first published after the opening of the Berlin Wall, What remains caused a great stir in the almost reunified Germany known as the Christa-Wolf-Debate. Especially in...

Christa Wolfs "Was bleibt" (i svensk oversettelse 1991 under tittelen "Vad blir kvar") står i sentrum av denne avhandlingen som undersøker dens kontekst, paratekst og tekst. Utgangspunktet for avhandlingen er observasjonen at den så kalte tysk-tyske litteraturstriden – som startet i juni 1990 i de store vesttyske avisene Die Zeit og Frankfurter All...