For a long time, at the Centre for Business History, we have been offering schools access to both company archives, source material and stories, all to highlight the part of business life in the general historiography. On January 15, Charlotta Skorup started as our new head of school outreach – and here are her first thoughts about her new job.
As a newcomer, I look forward to meeting all of you who want to learn more about history and archives! One of my most important tasks will be to open the archive for schools and universities. Something else that is high on my list is to make our school site Företagskällan even better.
Here at the Centre for Business History, there will be mroe lectures, workshops and close-up studies of source material, now that our school activities are back in motion. Our school site företagskällan.se, will continue to be the online branch of what we do, as an easily accessible knowledge bank with exercises and sources.
After an intensive first period, I have had time to get to know the house’s researchers, writera, publishers and all my other new colleageus. In the corridors, I have run into historians and writers who talked about housing capitalism and neoliberalism. I have peeped at fashion designers looking for clothes for their upcoming corporate exhibitions, with their hands deep in their collections, and in the reading room, visiting researchers were hard at work studying new material.
But the ones who made the biggest impression on me are all skilled and knowledgeable archivists. With great care, they handle the treasures of the archive every day, from the smallest preserved photograph to the most unwieldy design object. What a source of knowledge!
History pedagogy is facing a new reality with AI and all its possibilities. The arrival of AI in our time is already predicted to be more disruptive than digitization, or perhaps even industrialization in its time, and it is a rapidly evolving technology. As with anything new, this is something that we as teachers need to be curious about, and it not only creates new working methods but also new trends. We don’t really know yet how AI will affect the writing of history and learning, but the trend should be towards us becoming increasingly concerned with authenticity, a physical handshake when doing business, or sources we can trust.
Therefore, I am sure that history and archives are something that is trending. What could reasonably be more stimulating than having over 85,000 shelf meters of history behind you when you want to talk history for real!
