Clippings archive Vrij Nederland may not be shredded after all

Ten pallets in a warehouse in Diemen, containing about two hundred boxes with almost nine hundred biographical clippings folders. They were ornamental the digital cry for help van Free Netherlands-editor-in-chief Ward Wijndelts. Last month he had already appealed to X to save the clippings. That turned out to be in vain. Several large libraries and archives, including the Royal Library in The Hague, did not want the collection. That is why Wijndelts reported last week that the archive “will be completely thrown into the paper bin.”

The fact that the monthly magazine itself no longer has room for the clippings “ultimately has to do with money,” the editor-in-chief acknowledges. WPG Publishers, owner of VN, considers the storage costs for an archive that no one cares about to be unnecessary. But we don’t know what we are throwing away, says Wijndelts. Because although the media have recently made great strides in digitizing their own publications, a lot of knowledge disappears with the clippings folders that is not bundled or searchable online in a comparable way.

Moreover, says Wijndelts: “We know how long parchment and paper will last, but the long-term value of digital information is a major concern.” Online information is known to often disappear quickly, for example due to unpaid hosting costs or because owners or governments take it off-line.

In the seventies, then VN was still an illustrious weekly magazine with more than a hundred thousand subscribers, the clippings archive was in an ‘open display’ in the editorial office on the Amsterdam Raamgracht. Editors, biographers and other interested parties dug at will into articles from newspapers and magazines that documentalists had collected about a particular person over the years. When VN In 2015, the archive was moved to a smaller office and moved to the basement of the building. But when the documentalist retired shortly after the move, the clippings archive disappeared into storage.

In recent years, the working methods of journalists and other researchers have changed with the digital age. While clippings folders were an indispensable part of research until about two decades ago, nowadays databases LexisNexis and Delpher are mainly in vogue. Nobody ever came to the basement of the new office on Wibautstraat, let alone the warehouse in Diemen.

Every now and then Wijndelts brings colleagues with him with a special request. So fished NRCOmbudsman Arjen Fortuin last week took the clippings folder of the Belgian writer Louis Paul Boon from a box, for a biography he is working on.

The imminent end of the hundreds VN-cutting folders makes Wijndelts sad. But then: an unknown gentleman offers the editor-in-chief to house the archive himself, if there really is no other outcome. Wijndelts does not yet know how serious that offer is. He also received a message from the WPG director. The archive will only go away if he says so, the director assured him. “I have no illusions,” says Wijndelts. But perhaps the clippings folders can ultimately be retained.

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