Norsk Folkemuseum Archives Norwegian Museum of Cultural History

Overview

The Archives of Norsk Folkemuseum (the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History) are part of the museum's Documentation Centre on the Bygdøy peninsula in Oslo. Alongside the library and photographic collection, the archives form the principal research infrastructure of one of Europe's largest open-air museums, preserving documents relating to Norwegian cultural and social history from the early nineteenth century to the present.

History and Founding

Norsk Folkemuseum was founded in 1894 by librarian and historian Hans Aall (1869–1946), who served as its director for 52 years. The museum acquired its Bygdøy property in 1898 and opened to the public in 1901. An administration archive with material back to the museum's founding in 1894 forms the historical backbone of the archival collections. The collections expanded significantly in 1951 when the Sámi collections of the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Oslo were transferred to the museum.

In 1946 the Norwegian Ethnological Research archive (Norsk etnologisk gransking, NEG) was established as a cultural archives institution within the museum framework. NEG was created to collect, manage, and research accounts of daily life history and serves as a national resource for oral history and personal memory documentation. NEG is inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World programme.

Collections and Holdings

The archives consist of both private archives and records from the museum's own activities. Holdings include:

• Administration records dating to 1894
• Archives of current and former researchers at the museum
• Private archives with collections of letters, needlework patterns, and autobiographies
• Documentation records for artefacts, buildings, and photographs
• A comprehensive set of architectural surveying drawings of farmsteads and buildings from across Norway
• Worker's and Husmanns' (tenant farmer's) Oral History Material collected in the 1950s and 1960s
• NEG questionnaire responses and interview recordings on the history of everyday life

The museum's large photographic archive holds over two million photographs, including a significant portion of the work of photographer Anders Beer Wilse (1865–1949), documenting Norwegian life from the late nineteenth century onwards.

Access and Usage

The Documentation Centre, which includes the archives, library, and photographic collection, is the museum's research facility. Researchers may visit by appointment for access to archival and photographic materials. Selected digitised collections are available online through Digitaltmuseum and other platforms.