Arkiv Digital AD AB is a Swedish company that produces and provides color photographs of historical records, along with digital indexes of names for historical research. These resources cover a time span from the 1600s to the 1900s. The company's primary clientele includes genealogists, historians, local history researchers, libraries and associations.
Arkiv Digital operates as a privately-held limited liability company with its headquarters located in Lyrestad, within the Mariestad Municipality, Sweden.
The Family Tree Magazine has for over a decade, including in 2024, listed Arkiv Digital as one of the world's top 101 websites for genealogists.<REF NAME="Familytreemagazine_2024"/>
Since its founding in 2005, Arkiv Digital's competitive advantage has been the ability to offer newly photographed color images of Swedish historical records, unlike its competitors, who mainly offer black-and-white images digitized from microfilms and microfiche.<REF NAME="Black-and-white"/> Color photographs enhance readability, particularly when dealing with discolored documents or text that has been crossed out.<REF NAME="Color_photo"/>
Arkiv Digital photographs historical documents in public archival institutions across Sweden, including the National Archives of Sweden and its regional archives, the Military Archives, and the city archives of Stockholm and Malmö.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2012"/><REF Name="Product_catalog_2022"/> Their image database, as of the end of 2023, contains nearly 97 million color images of historical documents, many of which are spreads.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2023"/>
In general, the primary sources for Swedish genealogical research are the church books (parish registers) kept in the parish church archives, now stored in the regional archives under the National Archives. This is because up to 1991, most of the Swedish population registration in Sweden was legally managed by Church of Sweden on a per parish basis.<REF NAME="Church_books"/>
Among the key types of records Arkiv Digital has photographed are the following:
The image database also includes judicial documents, mostly court records and land registration protocols, as well as a considerable number of other archival series, such as prisoner rolls, and archives related to âÂÂseaman's housesâ (sjömanshus, state institutions for mustering and registering seamen in mercantile shipping).<REF NAME="Product_catalog_2023"/> Among local materials is an extensive collection of digitized historical records from the regional archive of the Swedish-speaking àland in Mariehamn, Finland.<REF NAME="àland"/>
Arkiv Digital has since 2016 been launching a number of large name indexes to historical records. By the end of 2023, the total number of index entries reached 262.3 million.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2023"/>
Among the key name indexes are:<REF NAME="Indexes"/>
All of these index entries â except for Census of Sweden for the years 1950 and 1960 â have direct links to the original sources. For subsequent years of Census of Sweden, the indexes themselves are the original, digital sources from the Swedish authorities.<REF NAME="Indexes"/>
In 2004, Mikael Karlsson in Mariestad started the business that later became Arkiv Digital. An investment memorandum from 2008 summarizes the origins: âÂÂThe initiative to establish the company Arkiv Digital was taken by Mikael Karlsson, Gabriel Wallgren, Magnus Näslund and others in the summer of 2005. One year prior, Mikael Karlsson had already started taking digital photographs of the church books for Bohuslän county; Gabriel Wallgren, with years of genealogical research experience, had been a partner of Genline [AB], where Magnus Näslund had been working as a software engineer and was a partner as well. In the fall of 2005, their cooperation was formalized, leading to the establishment of the limited liability company Arkiv Digital AD AB. In the summer of 2008, Arkiv Digital AD AB merged with HH DigiArkiv AB (formerly GH Microscan, founded in 2001) and acquired all the shares in the company. This was an important step in creating a genealogy research company for the future.â (Translated from Swedish.)<REF NAME="New_share_issue_2008"/>
The business idea was to âÂÂdigitize historical source material with the highest possible quality using the latest technical equipment available and sell these digitized images to genealogists, associations, libraries, and other researchers.âÂÂ<REF NAME="Annual_report_2007"/><REF NAME="CEO"/>
Initially, CDs were used to distribute the photographed documents. However, Arkiv Digital soon developed its own image format and software for internet distribution of images.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2006"/> This image viewing program integrated images, archival information, and catalog entries (mainly sourced from the National Archives Database, NAD), with images registered down to the page level.<REF NAME="Wiki-Rötter"/> In 2007, Arkiv Digital launched a subscription service, allowing researchers to access the company's entire image database via the internet.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2007"/> This service quickly became the company's primary source of revenue, a status it still holds. (According to the 2023 annual report, 98.4% of net turnover is from subscription sales, while 0.8% comes from book sales.)<REF NAME="Annual_report_2023"/>
In 2011, Arkiv Digital reported a positive result for the first time.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2021"/> The company received the financial newspaper Dagens Industri's âÂÂGasellprisetâ (âÂÂGazelle AwardâÂÂ) for rapid and profitable growth in 2013, 2014, and 2015.<REF NAME="Gasell_DI"/><REF NAME="Gasell_Rötter"/>
In the early years, Arkiv Digital mainly served Swedish genealogists. The early annual reports emphasized that it was âÂÂfounded by genealogists for genealogists,â and the company's focus was on documents in church archives.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2010"/> By the end of 2011, Arkiv Digital achieved its goal of digitizing the most relevant types of church books for genealogists, covering records up to around 1900.<REF NAME="Late_church_books"/><REF NAME="Relevant"/> This achievement allowed the company to offer photographs of the same church books as the then competitors Genline and SVAR, but with the added benefit of color. (SVAR was the department within the National Archives responsible for digitizing archival materials. These were made available on the digital platform SVAR, for a subscription fee.)
Around 2013, Arkiv Digital started broadening its range of source materials to appeal to new user groups, and the company began marketing itself in other Nordic countries and in the US to diversify beyond reliance on the Swedish market.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2013"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2021"/> In 2014, the company began adding a number of features that were missing on the SVAR platform.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2014"/> One of these was the service called âÂÂorder photographyâÂÂ, introduced in 2015. With this service, users could pay to have specific volumes digitized and added to the image database.<REF NAME="Order"/> Another example of diversifying was the acquisition in 2016 of several million older aerial photographs, depicting farms and houses of all kinds across Sweden, from the company Svenska Aero-Bilder AB. These photographs date from the 1950s onward<REF NAME="Aerial_photos"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2016"/> and were released in 2021, organized by map locations.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2021"/>
After some years of public debate, the digitized materials on the SVAR platform became a completely tax-funded service, free of charge, on February 1, 2018, and the platform was renamed âÂÂDigital Research Room.â That meant the National Archives became a strong competitor of Arkiv Digital.
The main clientele of Arkiv Digital are still the genealogists, and Arkiv Digital has since 2009 been the main sponsor for Släktforskardagarna, a Nordic, annual genealogy fair described as one of the largest assemblies for genealogists in the world, according to the company's annual reports.
In the 2014 annual report, Arkiv Digital highlighted a new trend among younger users: They are less inclined to sift through large volumes of documents and expect instead easy searchability; otherwise, they tend to give up. As a strategic move, the company started creating name indexes for various types of historical records. In early 2016, Arkiv Digital could offer the indexes Census of Sweden for 1950 and 1960 respectively, and The Swedish Population (âÂÂBefolkningen i SverigeâÂÂ) for 1880âÂÂ1920.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2015"/> The same year, Arkiv Digital initiated collaborations with various genealogy associations to create searchable name indexes for all of Sweden's birth, marriage, and death records.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2016"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2017"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2018"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2019"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2020"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2021"/> The annual report of 2016 states that the three legs of Arkiv Digital are the archival materials, the indexes, and the user interface.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2016"/>
The COVID-19 pandemic heavily limited the company's ability to photograph archival materials at state archives. According to the annual reports, much of the energy was instead spent on expanding the name indexes and improving the user interface.
In November 2019, Arkiv Digital added the feature of creating cloud-based family trees, manually or by uploading a gedcom file. The purpose of this was to connect subscribersâ genealogical research directly with the company's digitized historical records and index entries.<REF NAME="Annual_report_2019"/><REF NAME="Annual_report_2020"/>
In 2019, Arkiv Digital published HÃÂ¥kan Skogsjö's handbook Släktforskning pÃÂ¥ riktigt, with an expanded edition 2021 and a further expanded one in 2024.<REF NAME="Handbook_Swedish"/> For English-speaking researchers, an English version titled Explore your Swedish heritage, was released in 2020,<REF NAME="Handbook_English "/> followed by an expanded edition in 2023. The handbook focuses on Arkiv Digital's digitized archival materials and name indexes while also describing traditional archives and research methodology.<REF NAME="Handbook_review"/>
In 2023, Arkiv Digital began exploring whether AI technology could be used to transcribe older handwritten texts,<REF NAME="Annual_report_2023"/> since many young people struggle to decipher handwritten texts even from the 1900s.