ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 42. (ZAGREB, 1999.)

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J. van den Broek, Current developments in the archival network in the Netherlands, Arh. vjesn., god. 42 (1999), str. 103-112 of national importance. It should protect the heritage on the regional level as well. In the framework of this policy in the period between 1877 and 1888 the provincial archives were taken over by the State. Later on, these state archives in the provincial capitals were the obvious repositories for the old records of province-based branches of state agencies, such as courts of justice, prisons, and registries of mortgages. But, at the end of the 19

th century, this function of the state archives lay still far beyond the horizon. The only reason for the take-over was the desire to ensure the preservation of the regional archival heritage, consisting by that time almost entirely of records dating from before the French period. The first Dutch archival law dates from 1918. It laid the foundation of a network of government archives which survived the new versions of the law of 1969 and 1995. The structure of this network is very simple: the state archives keep the records of the institutions of the state and those of the provincial government and their predecessors. The municipal archives keep the records of the municipalities. As is the case in many countries, Dutch public archives have in their custody also records of private provenance, such as archives of churches, associations, enterprises and individual persons. These records have not been transferred to the public archives by virtue of any legal prescription, but have been taken in custody as a result of agreements with the owners. In addition to these two kinds of public repositories which are governed by law, there are two other categories of recordkeeping institutions. The first one is that of church, association and company archives, the second consists of a large number of specialised documentation centres such as the Literary Museum, the International Institute for Social History, the Netherlands Institute for Architecture, and, more recently, the Photo- and Filmarchives. These archives and documentation centres do not belong to the network of public archives in the sense of the archival law and their holdings are not subject to the archival legislation. The state archives make up the State Archival Service. At first there was not so much of a real National Service. In accordance with the technical and cultural conditions in government administration of the time the state archives in the provinces were more or less independent institutions, at the head of each of which stood a state archivist. The General State Archive in the Hague, where the records of the central government were being kept, was led by the General State Archivist, whose position among his colleagues state archivists I would prefer to characterize as primus inter pares rather than as chief. Only from the seventies on there has been a strong and purposeful movement towards reshaping the loose bunch of state archives into a real State Service under centralised command and control. Nevertheless, as a inevitable consequence of their holdings and, closely linked up with these, the knowledge and professional interests of their staff, the state archives in the provinces remained sim106