ARHIVSKI VJESNIK 40. (ZAGREB, 1997.)

Strana - 97

T. Thomassen, A Small Country in the World of Archival Education: the Dutch Case, Arh. vjesn., god. 40(1997) str. 95-104 the orientation of the curricula, the organisation and structure of the courses or the relations with the general educational and the public archive system. Easier than to classify those schools and programs it is to identify the principal factors which are determining the differences. Archival education appears to depend to a large extent on how in specific circumstances archival functions are understood and organized, on what status and orientation archival science has got and how strong and influencial the archival profession happens to be. Archival functions and archival science In different circumstances archival functions are defined and organized differently. Most differences are related to the orientation, the scope and the level of archival practice. In countries where the public archive system developed in the period of the French revolution, archival work originally had a strong historical orientation, while in the younger countries the orientation tends to be more administrative. Accordingly, archival education will be more historically or more administratively oriented. In some countries, only the administration of paper archives transferred to public archives services is considered to be the general archivist's work. In others archivists keep and exploit all kinds of archival material in all life cycle stages. Consequently, archival education might be more document oriented or more process and information oriented. Finally, in some countries archival work is understood and organized as a craft, in other countries archivists exercise their jobs as a profession. Archival education differs accordingly. Craftsmen have to learn how to do the job, have to learn mainly the characteristics of the job itself, professionals have to learn the underlying discipline, which is the reason of existence of the job. Different definitions and a different organisation of archival functions go along with differences in the status and application of archival science: Archival science emerged in the Old World as an offspring of diplomatics. Archivists were historians or jurists who had specialized in mediaeval diplomatics. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, archival science established itself as one of the auxiliary sciences of history. Archivists became historians or jurists specialized in archival science and other auxiliary sciences of history. Archival education was provided by departments of history, but in some countries France, The Netherlands, Germany - specialized schools were established to provide archival education as postgraduate programs. In the New World archival science was in the beginning not recognized as a scientific discipline at all. Archivists were not seen as specialized historians, but as 97