Accessing the NSU Archive

A puzzle and an adventure

Finding the right box which contains the information I was looking for, is basically an adventure. An exciting adventure, I would say. Because this is how the Archive works, basically: There is 22 meters of material of NSU stored in Copenhagen. But you cannot access these 22 meters, they are stored in different places. So you have to go online, to the Dasiy system , and figure out which box you want to see and order it. Then it takes about three working days for the box to arrive. All the material is classified, but all in Danish - which is a challenge when you don't speak Danish. Fortunately my Danish improved a lot during the time I spent in Copenhagen.

As I have only two weeks – which is a long time and a short time at the same time – I need to focus on getting at least the overview of the study program throughout the years. And not just the titles, but the descriptions. So what I end up being really interested in, is how the people of the circles describe their own topic. And finding that kind of information, for all seventy years, is quite a challenge.

And so I order more boxes, the archivist was kind enough to upgrade my account from the normal maximum of 15 boxes at one time to 30, after explaining to him I came from the Netherlands for this specific reason.

The Studiekredse

The labelling of the boxes is very general. So even if you know the box contains 1965-1966 ‘Studiekredse’ material, it is not clear what this contains. As I’m interested in the study circles, I ordered many of the boxes from the collection ‘studiekredse’. But that turned out not to be the place for me. Or well, not the place to get the full picture. NSU had many local organisations back in the day, which organised local meetings in the winter. Some circles had three or four places where they had representations, which all organised lectures and meetings. And there are many reports of those meetings. How many people attended, which people attended several times. And sometimes even the discussions are noted down. Which is all extremely fascinating, but way too detailed for my research.

The material on the study circles contained a lot of correspondence and minutes of lectures. The correspondence was partially useful, as it talked about how the organising of the symposia was taking place, who was responsible, and who was participating. Especially the letters from the NSU organising body to the coordinators was interesting, as it showed what they required of the coordinators: reports on meetings, and at a certain time they started to have formats for the study circle proposals. Yet from this correspondence it remained unclear who was making the decisions about which circle was going to be accepted and which one wasn’t. Also, the amount of proposals I found, was much less than I had hoped for. So therefore I mostly focused on at least getting all the information about the names of the circles, and take the proposals as an extra feature.

Having gone through the material that was labelled ‘studiekredse’, I managed to have a complete lists of study circles of only eight particular years. And several years partial data. Most documents in these boxes were of no use to my specific interest in this study. Many of the circles organised local meetings in the winter/spring. Often as much as five meetings per place, and two or three places. Depending on who was writing the reports, they might be one page or ten. Many lists of participants that were present during these local meetings. And sometimes a whole box would be filled by papers of just one or two study circles, and at other times the same sized box would contain several years of this material. Besides this, there was also a lot of correspondence about meetings organised by the program committee that was in charge of organising the summer session. Information about who was going to be attending, answering questions about the program and so forth.

Although most of this information was not particularly helpful for my specific research question, going through all the material that was available like this, made it possible to find out more about certain cases where the process of establishing and continuing study circles was not so smooth. One such case concerned the women’s circle in 1974, which I will go into in more detail in a separate chapter in the book that is going to come out next summer as a result of this research project.

So, going through the ‘studiekredse’ boxes wasn’t enough. I wanted to at least find a complete list of study circles per year, and there were many years that had documentation of only two or three circles. So I needed to expand my search. Another set of boxes that seemed like a good bet, were the ‘Sessioner’. These boxes contained information on the summer sessions. Here were program booklets of summer sessions, which often listed all the study circles present that summer, and sometimes even complete with more or less detailed descriptions of the circles. These boxes were thus very helpful. The problem was, that not all years were presented as a session in the archive, and after a certain year, around 1990, the information booklets didn’t name the circles anymore. That is interesting in itself, that this information is assumed, and not presented to the participants. But it didn’t help me a lot.

A next source were the boxes labelled with ‘Information from NSU’. These were newsletters sent out to NSU members. First by airmail, and later by email. Here was a lot of information presented, and at least a lot of lists of circles were available like this. But there were some problems to following this information. First of all, it was all presented in the words of the Board. This is fine when you want to know the names of the study circles, but when it comes to a description of what the circle is about, these newsletters were either very brief or even completely lacking. Another issue was that after 1990 these newsletters were done by email and they referred to the website for all the information I needed. A website that no longer exists. I could find the data I was looking for up to 2007 in the Danish National Archive. And from 2013 onwards, the information is presented at the NSU website that is still up: nordic.university. But there were five years missing. I contacted Set Lonnert, who has been involved with NSU for many years and at present is still helping out with the communication and online presence of NSU. He has an archive of material on hard disks and was able to share a collection of material from 1993 until the present that he had collected, largely uncategorized, in an online database. From this material I was able to find the information for the years 2008-2012 that were still missing. There were no full descriptions of the study circles, but at least the list of names could now be completed.

Next to this, I realised that it was unclear how the decision was made which circle proposal would be accepted as a circle, and which ones as a working group (arbejdgruppen*) or planning group (planungsgruppen*). I realised I was clouded by my own personal experience, as nowadays the General Assembly decides on this issue during the General Assembly meeting during the summer session. Not an easy task to do democratically. But I couldn’t find many minutes of the General Assemblies held in previous years. Except for 1950, when there was only a small group of people who met in Lysebu, Norway, and there are minutes of that meeting. These minutes were very interesting, and although I only read them because I was interested in this topic as I’m a board member at present, responsible for organising the General Assembly, I realised that it was a very important source to figure out how they organised and thought about the study program. So I extended my original research question to also look at the organisation of the study program, to see who is making decisions around the study program. This led me to look at other boxes which contained minutes of board meetings. And so the research grew, and developed through the data I discovered in the archive.

The most challenging year for me was 1953. It was the year which I couldn't find any data on for a long time. I couldn't find anything about that year in the session boxes, there were no program leaflets from the summer session, but finally in a box full of correspondence there were both lists of study circles as well as the final descriptions of each circle separately. Great!

And some days were just very productive. Finally having figured out which kind of boxes contained the right information, on day 5 I found 26 years of material in total!

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