The great interest in old motor vehicles is the reason why the National Archives is now digitizing the state motor vehicle registers. A selection from Rogaland, Vestland and Møre og Romsdal is already available in the Digital Archive.
Interest in historic motor vehicles is high in Norway. Old cars, motorcycles and trucks are restored to a new life, and many of them can be seen on the roads, especially during the summer, when people find pictures of vehicles they have fond memories of and share them online. Curiosity about the identity of the vehicles and who has owned them is triggered. Even when neither the vehicles nor their owners are no longer with us. But the information about them is alive and well, in the archives of the authorities that once managed the control of the vehicles and their owners.
The National Archives is experiencing great interest in these archives. Both in person at our reading rooms and through written inquiries. This year we have therefore started digitization for self-service of these archives. These are manual registers, created in the time before the transition to the electronic vehicle register «Autosys» in the 1980s.
So far, we have managed to publish a selection from Rogaland, Vestland and Møre og Romsdal, in addition to a few national registers. You can now find these under the hashtag «Cars and motor vehicles» in the Digital Archive.
In parallel, we are also working to make the oldest «Autosys» databases available and searchable on Digitalarkivet.
