Oral History Society

The Sound Archive of the Film and Science Foundation and the Dutch Radio Organisation(NOS)Author(s): The Phonographic Bulletin of the International Association of Sound Archives andRolf L. SchuursmaSource: Oral History, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1972), pp. 23-26Published by: Oral History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40178378 .

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THE SOUND ARCHIVE OF THE FILM AND SCIENCE FOUNDATION AND THE

DUTCH RADIO ORGANISATION (NOS)

by DR. ROLF L. SCHUURSMAf Stichting Film en Wetenschap, Utrecht.

23.

Talk given at the meeting of the "Radio and History" study group, April 5, 1970 in Cologne, and at the annual meeting of the International Association of Sound Archives in Peipzig, June 1U, 1970.

I should like to start this report on the co-operation between our sound archive and the Dutch Radio Organisation, NOS, by saying something about the

history of our archives. In 1961 Dr. C.D.J. Brandt, Professor of contemporary history at the University of Utrecht, asked me to collect documentation about sound recordings relating to 20th century political and socio-economic history. I had been Professor Brandt's assistant before, but had finished my studies in

1960, and had been a teacher in the meantime.

Earlier on, Professor Brandt had tried to use sound recordings in addition to usual documents, like reports, letters, newspapers, etc. Unluckily no archive in the Netherlands in possession of records of this type was prepared to offer them for university teaching and still less for secondary school

teaching. Some municipal archives like those in Rotterdam and Amsterdam already had a small collection of sound recordings, but of course relating only to those

particular towns.

The national archive in The Hague was obliged solely to collect material

directly produced by the government or by national institutions, and for this reason possessed only a few sound recordings.

One thing was clear at that time; the NOS, then still the NRU (Netherlands Radio Union) had a large collection of sound recordings on discs and tapes. The question was, whether the NOS was prepared to put this material at the disposal of scientific research and teaching.

As you know, Dutch broadcasting is strangely structured, largely as a

result of widely differing ideological and political thinking in the Netherlands. In its basic form this structure started to farm already in the twenties. There are therefore several broadcasting groups - Catholic, Liberal, Socialist - etc., each of which uses part of the total broadcasting time. Beside this the NOS has

to broadcast so-called general programmes, to be chiefly responsible on technical matters, and also, most important for us, to keep part of the picture -

and sound - recordings in archives, particularly in the television archive and the sound archive directed by Mr. van Dalfsen. Of course the sound archive of

the Dutch Radio has not been collected for people or organizations other than

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24.

those that are directly connected with the broadcasting system. In 1960 I

spoke to Mr, Hietbrink about this situation, which is in actual fact a normal and understandable one.

Mr. Hietbrink was the director of the Radio Union's Programme department at that time and therefore Mr. van Dalf sen's superior. Mr. Hietbrink found an

extraordinary solution for our problem, a solution which immediately made

possible the foundation of a sound archive for our institute. Just at that time most of the discs and part of the older tapes had been twice copied on

tapes, but what should be done with the originals was yet undecided. Mr. Hietbrink suggested that these original recordings should be given into the

care of our institute (at that time the Institute of History of the University of Utrecht). We accepted this offer gratefully. That is how in 1962 the Institute for History received about 16,000 discs and 2t000 tapes.

Out sound archive is designed for recordings relating to political and socio- economic history. It therefore has a limited scope but nevertheless

presupposes a large collection, especially since we are of course not dealing just with the history of the Netherlands. This limitation has the advantage that we can assess the material from a scientific point of view, as historians are accustomed to do with other documents. With this point of view in mind we have always tried to enlarge the collection.

First of all the Radio of the Netherlands has given us every year tapes with new recordings. I1 11 refer to this later but can say already now, that

these are about 500 tapes a year. Secondly the fairly small but very

interesting collection of records in the institute for war documentation in

Amsterdam was loaned to us. This collection comprises mainly records which

were conscripted straight after the war, very interesting recordings of the

Dutch National Socialist Party - the NSB of Anton Mussert - before the war and

part of the sound recordings made during the war by the Dutch Radio. Later we

were authorised by the Ministry of Justice to make copies of the records in

archives of the special courts of justice for Dutch National Socialists etc. Since the collection of the Radio Broadcasting Archive had already many thousand

recordings from the years of the occupation and of Radio Oranje, the

station of the Dutch Exile Government in London, we can rightly say that we have

a nearly complete archive of extant recordings from the years 1940 - 1945.

Our archive has furthermore for some years been busy making interviews with

various personalities, especially politicians like our former Minister /President

Dr. Drees, and former members of one of the fascist or national - socialist

movements. These interviews have been recorded to give new material to later

historians. They are mostly under embargo for a shorter or longer period and

therefore cannot yet be at the disposal even of our radio.

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25.

In the meantime we have received an interesting private collection, which

includes several hundred commercially produced discs with documentation from

all over the world, the so called H.K.M. Nijkerk Legacy.

Our sound archive has a much more limited collection than the usual radio

archive, but with its concentration on political and socio- economic history it has a singular position in our country, largely thanks to the special co-

operation of our radio.

As historians we would like to be there with our tape recorders, wherever we

think important happenings and developments are taking place. As you know this

is unluckily impossible. We therefore use documents which have been recorded

by the Radio for example, and try to make do with these. This entails

regrettable restrictions: only part of the recordings, mostly the part that is

used for the broadcast, is kept for a longer period, that is longer than the

commentator takes for the preparation of the broadcast. Out of this lot again

only a small part is sent on to the archive (at least this is the case with the

Dutch Radio). This part is copied onto tapes in the archive and processed in

the card index. After this it is also at our disposal and is partly copied by us and processed in our card index. Whilst most of the radio recordings in

our archive are originals, we are now getting all new recordings for copying

only. This system has the advantage that we do not need to extend our archive

every year and fill it with bulky NOS tapes, but need to make copies only of

what is interesting to us. Thanks to this system we are getting many

interesting recordings and we can assume that we are dealing with the most

important material recorded by the radio.

I would prefer to get more material than that which is used in the broadcast

and I hope it will be possible in the future to find a better solution.

Particularly in the case of commentaries and interviews, which are mostly broadcast

just after the news on the Dutch Radio, we are interested in getting far more

details than the listeners. I know there are many and difficult problems, but

it would be worth the trouble to talk about this as well.

From the beginning of our archive we have worked together with a foundation

for film documentation in Amsterdam, the governing body of which was headed by Professor F. de Jong, Director of the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. I was the secretary of this governing body and beside my work at

the Institute of History at Utrecht I was occupied with the administration of

this foundation.

Since 1962 the contents of newsreels and documentary films that are kept in

the Dutch Film Museum at Amsterdam and in the national archive at The Hague have

been checked and processed in a card index of this foundation. From the beginning

our index cards were of one size, and as far as possible of the same lay-out.

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26.

By continual co-operation we worked out a useful system of key words.

Furthermore we have tried for years to unite the two organisations - our

sound archive and the Foundation for Filmdocumentation. With the help of the

Ministry of Education and Science we reached this goal in 1970. The nationally financed Film and Science foundation at Dtrecht has been producing films for

over 50 years already to serve science , and furthermore it owns a large television department. This foundation was prepared to receive us and to make

a documentation centre out of our institutes and the existing library. In

this department it is now possible to co-ordinate the documentation of picture- and sound - recordings in the Dutch archives, to collect data about scientific

films produced by the foundation or elsewhere and literature on picture and

sound aiding science.

Our co-operation with the NOS which has been very fruitful up to now will

surely bring even more success within the framework of the Film and Science

Foundation, and I hope that in the future it will also be possible to co-operate with the television archive of the NOS. We have felt that several members of

the Dutch Radio are interested in a documentation centre for archive material

that contains not just data about picture and sound recordings in the archives

of the Radio but also data about recordings kept elsewhere.

(Translated from the Phonographic Bulletin of the International Association of Sound Archives)

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