Main areas of work related to the Convention:
Identification, documentation and research of the collective memory is the museums main subject and have been ongoing for at least hundred years. The last years focus is on music groups around the county. Contested memories has also been in focus for several years.
Interactive preservation, systematic protection, promotion, and enhancement is nowadays a very important topic for a sustainable society and vital for a museum. In many years have the museum worked together with and support local cultural history associations to safeguard both storytelling and practical traditions – as non-formal education. But this is also made together with for example elementary schools.
Revitalisation is often for us a spinoff of the work described above but have recently been working with revitalisation of some techniques like carving, knitting, yearn dying etc. The museum is also often involved in campaigns together with the Swedish NGO Hemslöjden about linen, sustainable producing etc.
Objectives
The museum was founded in 1880 as a museum association with the goal to save the traditions and cultural heritage and at the same time be a teaching institution about the past. During the 20th century the collections of both material and intangible heritage has evolved at the same time as the commitment grow. Today the museum organisation includes an exhibition building, two open air museums and handicraft atelier/workshops. The responsibility is to store collections and to safeguard the knowledge about traditions and the history of the region. It is also to foster, develop and renew handicrafts as an expression of culture. The museum is working toward high standard of handicraft as well as ensuring the cultural knowledge of material. Techniques and functions within handicrafts and craft are relevant living traditions. The museum also stores one of the biggest non-state sound-collections of traditional music, dance and tales/stories in Sweden.
From the charter/statute document: ‘The purpose of the foundation shall be to manage the foundation's collections, buildings and land areas and to keep them accessible to the public. The foundation shall, mainly in the county of Västernorrland, conduct and promote cultural environment conservation and museum activities as well as other compatible and related cultural activities, and to appropriately deepen and convey knowledge in related subjects to as broad a public as possible.[…]’
Cooperation
Cooperation on ICH with communities and groups forms often from the community’s needs or interests. Then we frequently add identification and documentation or research to save contemporary expressions of intangible heritage.
The museum is also member of and active in International Council of Museums – ICOM – in different working groups, international network for music archives, networks for handicraft practitioners and network for contemporary documentation.
We have contact and sometimes work together in international collaboration with other NGOs such as Norwegian Centre for Traditional Music and Dance, Norway, Finnish folk music institute, Kaustinen, Finland and about handicraft together with Hemslöjden (National Association of Swedish Handicraft Societies) Sweden. And of course, national expert nodes and key institutions as Statens musikverk and the Swedish institute for Language and Folklore (Isof), wish coordinate the 2003 Convention in Sweden, and the Swedish National Commission for UNESCO.
The museum has worked together with local history associations from the beginning but to stabilise the work today the regional history associations have members in the board of the museum to inform and plan common activities.
