A comprehensive understanding of user needs is required to support the development of useful digital archives. While archival science research has met this demand by inquiring into a significant range of user groups, users of popular movement archives remain understudied. Addressing this gap, this paper reports on a focus group study of key academic and professional users (N = 21) of popular movement archives. This study reveals user needs that are an amalgamation of informational, management-related, social, personal, and technical needs that principally emanate from the archival records themselves rather than the digital archive platform. Purposes and uses, archive and digital archive, disciplinary background, and expertise are four contexts of user needs with a significance of how users frame and express their record-finding and record-use needs in popular movement archives. The main conclusion of this study is that while it is important to recognize the heterogeneity of user groups and archives, it is similarly important to be aware and explicit about what kind of an archive a popular movement archive is for its different users and uses, and when developing a digital archive, what kind of an archive a particular digital popular movement archive is aiming to be and for whom.
Sköld et al. (2025) studied this question.