Saving and presenting ICA's history - About the project
By Edward Blom, January 2003.
"The ICA History Project" was initiated in November 2000. The client was the ICA Federation and the executor was the Stockholms Företagsminnen. (Note: In 2006, we changed our name to today's Centrum för Näringslivshistoria, in English: Centre for Business History in Stockholm.) The project's goal was to secure ICA's history and then spread knowledge about it - primarily to employees within the ICA movement, but also to the academic world, schools, and an interested public.
Securing historical material
The first phase of the project consisted of collecting archival material. All the buildings where ICA kept older documents were visited. Basements and passages were searched, all material was inspected, and an assessment was made of which materials were worth preserving for posterity.
Next came the most time-consuming part of the project, processing, organizing, and cataloging the 600 incoming shelf meters of material. First, the material had to be physically treated to be preserved over time. it was removed from binders and folders. Paper clips, plastic, and paper with low pH levels were removed and documents placed in bundles in buffered paper sheets (so-called fascicle paper) which were then placed in special archive boxes. Second, the material was made searchable: a thorough review of all documents was conducted and a systematic sorting of these by record creator, main divisions, series, and subseries was carried out. After the cataloging was completed, there is very high searchability in the archival material.
Alongside the cataloging of documents, an almost equally extensive effort was made to organize the archive's image collection, consisting of a total of 80,000 photographs, in the form of slides, negatives, and regular paper photographs. All photographs have been sorted and overview registered. About one-third of them have also been transferred into protective transparent photo sleeves.
Film and audio materials have also been registered. All films, photographs, and audio tapes are now stored in our special cooled rooms for AV materials.
Finally, ICA's historical object and painting collections were organized and registered. All paintings and a large part of the objects have also been documented through photography.
Interviews
To complement the written sources, an oral history project was conducted where Roland Fahlin, Rune Monö, Rolf Olteng, and Gösta Brissman were interviewed. Later, an interview with Guy Sandvik was added. Early on, discussions were held with Nils-Erik Wirsäll, during which Anders Wijk and Gösta Brissman were also present. In addition to these interviews, several interviews and conversations were conducted by phone, several of which resulted in articles for the DVD and many were recorded. All interview material has been transcribed and included in ICA's historical archive.
Articles, images, audio, etc.
For the DVD ICA History - in Part and Detail, 200 articles (along with some fact boxes) about ICA's history were written. Article authors included academics from various disciplines, archivists who worked with the historical documents, current and former employees within the ICA movement, as well as well-known journalists and writers. Articles were illustrated with photographs and documents from ICA's archives.
Furthermore, over 2,000 photographs and documents were scanned for the DVD. A photo index with detailed descriptions was created for the images. Films and audio recordings (including old wax cylinders) were digitized.
As an introduction to each main theme, as well as to the disc as a whole, six slideshows with narration and newly composed background music were created. (An additional slideshow, not included on the DVD, had previously been made for the ICA meeting in Malmö 2001.)
As an overview and a more lighthearted entry into the articles, an interactive timeline was created with 60 illustrated fact boxes and links to a large part of the articles. For each decade that ICA (and its predecessors) existed, there is a text about what happened in the world at large, read by Hans Villius. Additionally, the project group and Ambient Media jointly created an "interactive country store" and an interactive archive.
A very pleasant project
It has been a privilege for us at the Stockholm Business Memories Association involved in the project to work with ICA's history. ICA has a very interesting history and fantastic archive material (where perhaps the life-sized ICAnder costume is the most original archive document). The creator of ICA's logo, Professor Rune Monö, has said that working with ICA in the 1960s was unusually pleasant because the people he met within ICA were more open than usual in business life. We have experienced that this still holds true during the project. Both our direct clients at the ICA Federation, the representatives in the project group from ICA Handlarnas AB, veterans we interviewed, officials who helped us with material collection, article authors, or merchants we met at meetings have all been equally positive and did everything to make the project possible. All in all, one must conclude that it has been a very pleasant project!
Remaining work
Even though the work on the DVD ICA History - in Part and Detail is completed, the work with ICA's history is not finished. A major task remaining is to create an archival policy to ensure that material created today, which will be interesting in the future, is preserved.
Another assignment is to spread knowledge about ICA's history with the help of exhibitions, "storytelling," and collaborative projects with schools and universities. Finally, this DVD is not a finished product either; we hope it can be released in new editions with more articles, pictures, films, etc. Because history doesn't end and documents added in current operations will be historical source material in 10 years—if not sooner.
Ulvsunda, January 2003
Edward Blom
Archivist at Stockholm Företagsminnen and project leader for the ICA history
