The pilot project Jubilee Archives: Initial inventory, digitisation, and analysis of the Gothenburg University Library's collection on the city's 300th anniversary in 1923 takes its starting point in the celebration of Gothenburg's 300th anniversary in 1923. The grandest event of the celebration, the so-called Jubilee Exhibition, took place from Götaplatsen to Liseberg, and during the period from 8 May to 15 October it served as a temporary hub in the city's public space. Interest in the exhibition was enormous, with a total of 4.2 million visitors, 41,000 of whom came from abroad. Its format, size and programme meant that it also became a frequent feature of the Swedish and international media of the time, with increasingly modern communication technologies spreading news, reports, interviews, and images faster and to more people than ever before.
One hundred years later, the Jubilee Archive pilot project is taking inventory and analysing these media actors and their publicity-minded jubilee material. Partly to save unique archive material and partly to generate new information about Gothenburg and its role as a city of knowledge using mechanical digital analysis. The research material consists of five folders in a unique collection about the Jubilee Exhibition, which is kept in the University Library of Gothenburg (UB). The entire collection consists of 69 folders of press clippings, each folder containing more than 200 pages. It is estimated that the collection contains around 40-50,000 items in total. The material is now very fragile, difficult to handle and parts of it have started to fall apart. The Jubilee Archive pilot project therefore also represents a cultural, social, local, linguistic, media and financial history project that will save a unique collection for future research, teaching and availability.
Through digitisation and mechanical inventory of five folders (approximately 1000 pages) in the University Library's collection from the Jubilee Exhibition, the project investigates what kind of information and knowledge a mechanical analysis of press material can generate about the use of language, images, and media in 1923, about the responsible parties and institutions, and about Gothenburg as a city of knowledge. Materials and project results will be made available digitally on a continuous basis for future use. The long-term ambition is that this pilot project is only a first step in a necessary rescue operation of the entire UB collection on the Jubilee Exhibition in 1923.
