part of the education were not confined to state archives but included a range of
different archives all over the Netherlands. The trainees, most of them historians
as in Marburg, were sent to The Hague for their theoretical education. However,
they normally had no PhD at that time.
The differences to Marburg are evident in the organization of the courses. The
practical and theoretical parts were integrated: the trainees worked four days in
an archive and one day at the Archiefschool, with the result that the theoretical
part was very small and could not expand too much. The German trainees were
civil servants during their education, which means that they were paid during
their education. In the Netherlands, many of the trainees received no money
from the archives. They were mostly volunteers. And in Germany the archives
paid the costs of the theoretical part of the programme, while in The Netherlands
students had to pay tuition fees.7
"Old style" curricula in Marburg and Amsterdam
The curricula in Marburg and Amsterdam were quite similar until the mid 80s.
This situation changed when in The Netherlands in the late 80s subjects like
Latin palaeography and parts of diplomatics were cancelled because most of
the candidates no longer had any knowledge of Latin. In addition, a lot of new
themes had been integrated into the curriculum in Amsterdam, so much so that
the Archiefschool came to a point where its capacity barrier was reached.8
At the same time the Board of the Archivschule, which was responsible for the
curriculum, decided - in defiance of all protests against the old kind of education
- that Latin, medieval palaeography and diplomatics still had to be an important
part of the curricula. They only increased the importance of archival science
by a small proportion. Even after this increase archival science was not really
dominant (see Table 1).
KARSTEN UHDE TIMES ARE CHANGING
Field
Archiefschool
Archivschule
Archival science
148 50%
330 34%
Auxiliary sciences9
65 22%
288 30%
History
35 12%
270 28%
Others
44 15%
84 9%
Total
292 hours
972 hours
Table iHours of lessons within the two educational programmes in the late 80s
7 The situation of the Archiefschool in those years is described in: Theo Thomassen: ,Aus- und Fortbildung der
Archivare in den Niederlanden' in: Erstes Deutsch-Niederlandische-Belgisches Archivsymposion (Miscellanea
Archivistica Studia 18), Brussel 1992, p. 95-105.
8 Thomassen (see note 6), p. 99.
9 Auxiliary sciences are: diplomatics, palaeography, genealogy, heraldry etc.
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