This web application allows you to search the annual reports and financial statements of the blue-collar trade union organisations of the labour movement, from the local and national levels in Sweden to the international trade secretariats and the international trade union federation. Four archive institutions are participating in publishing material in this service. The local material is kept at the Popular Movements Archive for Uppsala (FAC). The material from the Swedish national trade unions and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation is published by the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library (ARAB). The material from the international trade secretariats is published by the Archiv der Sozialen Demokratie (AdSD), and the material from the International Trade Union Confederation is published by the International Institute of Social History (IISH). 

The material on the local and national levels, from organisations within the Swedish labour movement, is in Swedish. The material from international levels contains information in English, but occasionally in other languages as well, such as German and French.

The material is multilingual and spans an extended period, including spelling reforms and rising educational levels among trade union members. This will affect your search results. We have tried to compensate for this somewhat. For instance, by normalising the transcriptions of the Swedish material published before 1920. In 1906, Sweden introduced a spelling reform. Still, we have seen in the material that this hadn’t taken effect in the organisations until some years later, which is why we have also chosen to normalise texts printed some years later.

For the material in Swedish, we have also performed Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify names, organisations, workplaces, published works, and objects of interest in the text. These results have been used to create search facets and filters to narrow searches in the material. Filters using NER are currently not available for the international material.

To cover most user needs and wishes, we have facilitated search in several ways

The Search bar (1)

The search bar at the top is a free-text search across all reports and pages on the site. The results are displayed as thumbnails of the reports containing the search word. To see the result, you click the report, and the text opens in a viewer with the result highlighted.

Since the collection is reasonably large, you will need to filter your search to get narrower results. This can be done either with the search facets on the left-hand side of the page or with a combination of filters in the advanced search, which can be accessed via the link above the search results column.

FACETS (2)

When you use a facet, the filter is applied immediately when you click the checkbox or select an option from the dropdown menu. The facets only make use of one single meta data field each, meaning the results given will only show available in that field. For instance, the “Organisation” facet will only show results in reports published by that organisation, not all instances an organisation is mentioned in all reports in the collection.

The facets available are

ADVANCED SEARCH FILTERS (3)

To get more options than the simple search bar or the facets can provide, you can use the Advanced search option. Here you can add filters to your search, using metadata fields in the collection as well as values for each of those, for example, “contains” or “starts with”, etc. 

You can combine any of these filters in your search.