ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 40. (ZAGREB, 1997.)

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T. Thomassen, A Small Country in the World of Archival Education: the Dutch Case, Arh. vjesn., god. 40(1997) str. 95-104 In 1802, a few years after the Dutch bourgeois revolution had caused the separation of current and non-current records, the public archive service had been established, in order to preserve old documents for the benefit of historical research. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century this first step in the process of professionalisation was followed by the other five steps. In 1892 the Association of Dutch Archivists was founded, the first association of this kind in the world. In 1898 the manual of Muller, Feith and Fruin was published, codifying the new principles of archival science. And in 1918, the first Dutch archival law was issued. The establishment of an archives school by the Dutch government in 1919 can be considered to be the crowning glory of the job. From that moment onwards, any person who wanted to enter the profession was obliged to complete one of the programs of the school and to pass the archival examination. The profession actually controlled the school. Representatives of the archival community decided upon the admission of the students; most of the teachers were working archivists; students attended lectures at the school only one day a week and worked during the rest of the time as trainees in a repository. The education of senior archivists was the Archive School's central duty and its postgraduate program its most important program. Only those who possessed a degree in law or history and were working in the archives were allowed to enter this one year program and to specialize in archival science - which was understood as an auxiliary science of history. Apart from archival science, codified in the manual, other auxiliary sciences of history were taught, such as diplomatics, paleography, chronology and mediaeval latin, as well as the history of the old Dutch state institutions. Having passed the examination, the new senior archivist was well prepared to analyse mediaeval diploma's and Ancien Regime archives. The program for educating middle grade archivists was aimed at preventing booksellers and office clerks to fullfill non academic professional posts in archival services. The students of the middle grade level were allowed to study the same subjects as their senior colleagues, except for the subjects they were supposed not to understand, which were the most subjects offered. The manual of Muller, Feith and Fruin was the most important teaching tool. It codified the by then developed concepts of archival science. This scientific discipline, however, which according to the title of the Manual was identified with the arrangement and description of archives, was still in its first stage of development; scientific debate was not very vigorous yet. The Manual, nicknamed "The hundred rules", became a holy book, a tool to discipline the new members of the profession, rather than a basis for scientific discussion. By consequence, Dutch archivists, for a 100