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June 10, 2024 - In-Tromsø, cont.
It’s Monday, and the breakfast downstairs isn’t quite as lavish as my previous hotel’s. Nonetheless, it was more than enough; I polish off the food and then quickly gathered my belongings upstairs. Today I’m headed to the Regional State Archives in Tromsø, a division of the national Arkivverket services run by the Norwegian government. I find my bike where I left it down on the street, and follow the same route I’d taken just the day before heading north out of sentrum. Biking in the road isn’t much of a problem, though I come to a point where a clear bike path veers away from the vehicles. I follow this path up a long hill over the entrance to a tunnel that takes a highway through the central mountain on Tromsøya, eventually entering a glade of trees and a shady path. I continue until I reach UiT, Tromsø’s university campus that looks much the same as any contemporary American counterpart - it particularly reminds me of University of Michigan’s north campus, with a little bit of extra fjord and mountain scenery gracing the backdrop. I park my bike and walk through a cluster of buildings, past an interesting rippling landscape art installation, over to a building marked with Arkivverket’s seal. Through a red door, access controlled and only breached when a kind employee let me inside, I march up a set of stairs to the second level and introduce myself to the archive reading room attendant.
The reading room itself is completely void of occupants save the attendant, with neatly organized desks and cute green chairs occupying most of the floor space and bookcases set against the far wall. The attendant is a man named Trond; I’d corresponded with him via email several weeks earlier, during the course of which he informed me he couldn’t accommodate my request for weekend reading room hours and that I would need to make the limited opening hours on Mondays if I wanted to access the archive material. Now, he has me sign in as a visitor and grabs the catalogue for the archive I’ve requested access to. It was clear to me online that this archive, a collection of materials from Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK), was large and voluminous, though it wasn’t until the catalogue sat in front of me that I realized just how big it actually was. SNSK is a nationalized mining company that operates out of Longyearbyen on Svalbard; they are one of the largest actors on the island, running the coal company upon which Longyearbyen was founded as a permanent settlement and now transitioning to real estate and alternative energy.
The directory for SNSK’s public collection at the Regional State Archives is a binder roughly three inches thick. There is a short narrative occupying the first 10 pages, after which each page lists rows and rows of independent archival units that could be summoned from storage and brought to me in the reading room. These individual units are either 6” x 12” x 12” boxes filled to capacity with documents, or a drawing tube containing old maps and sketches. These documents span the years 1912 - 1998. I browse the entire catalogue quickly and jot down some numbers, using a table of contents to roughly gauge what I might be interested in. They are generally titled and organized into clear sections, but it should be noted I’m guessing at this point - I’m hoping to find maps of early mineral + resource discovery/documentation but there’s no telling what might be on each map when I pull it out of the archival tube. In total I’m able to pull 5 archival boxes and 3 drawing tubes during the length of my stay from 11am until the reading room closes at 3pm. I browse many maps and land surveys, as well as labor contracts, construction document sets, editorials from local newspapers, machine schematics, and telegrams from the island back to headquarters on the mainland. I’m exhausted by the time I’m done and I haven’t even filtered through half of a single page of the directory. SNSK has a second, private-access archive containing roughly 1.5x the amount of content in the public one - I wouldn’t be able to touch that material unless SNSK gave permission along with an official research ID registered with Norway’s Arkivverket (not that I’d be able to exhaust the public catalogue even if I were given a year with the material in this archive).
Leaving the archive, I feel extremely happy to have spent time here rather than making my way to Tromsø - the effort feels well spent. I bike away from campus but continue uphill, finding a bike path that leads up to a crest running the length of Tromsøya. As I traverse the island from the top of the ridgeline, I pass a giant hangar-like sports hall and a wonderfully designed swimming/climbing center adjacent to it. The trails lead on to a public park, next to which I find a satellite ground station - this is what I’d been looking for. This station, KSAT Tromsø, is run by the same organization responsible for running the ground station in Svalbard. This one is much smaller, and access is far less restricted - in some cases, I can walk directly up to the satellite dishes and tessellated dome structures. They whir softly, some changing position as I gaze at the imaging systems. I’m intrigued by these instruments that communicate with the unseen, how they are used to image the earth and transmit data. For now I move on, circling through the park and then back down into the city center.
I have dinner at a restaurant around the corner from the hotel and then sit in the park for a while. When I return to my room for the evening armed with a tea from 7-Eleven, I try to work more on these travel logs, with middling success.
location: tromsø, troms (NO)
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