Commercial and Industrial Archives in Denmark

Abstract

title of this essay may cause eyebrows to rise in some quarters, but the term business records, used in the U.S.A. for the materials here considered, is generally too narrow. So is the Danish word erhverv, used as the name of Denmark's unique state-owned institution in Aarhus (Jylland) the subject of this article. Any institution in functional contact with its human environment, even an educational institution, accumulates some of the records kept by any enterprise, whether it manufactures, manipulates, ameliorates, or utilizes in any way raw materials or others' goods to transform them into products of its own making, or whether it acquires such products only to resell them. In many cases the producer sells his own product; certainly in his case one may not speak of business records alone, in the sense of those of a merely distributive trade. The German word Wirtschaft and the Swedish term naringsliv are similarly limited, though they probably have a little more scope than the Danish and English terms mentioned. There is good reason to work towards unequivocal terminology in all areas of scholarship and science; the idealist will continue the trend toward such purification for esthetic and ethical reasons, as of old; the rest of us will have to yield to the demands of the computers, who perhaps know not beauty and goodness, but certainly know the truth. There is, of course, always good reason to compare notes with men anywhere doing the same thing; and there are, in our jet age, many more opportunities to do this, almost from day to day. Which explains the sketch presented here to typify a relatively new and rather underdeveloped area industrial and commercial archives. The writer undertook to expose himself, incidental to his attendance at the archival convention in Brussels during August 1964, to some of the institutions in Northern Europe dedicated to ( 1 ) the collection and interpretation of the materials originating as byproducts of human effort in all sorts of individual, corporate, and collective ventures to transform the physical world and ( 2 ) making a living or