The Money Museum will close in a month, but its collection (as far as important) will go to De Nederlandsche Bank. The Tropenmuseum has been disbanded, but the collection will be housed elsewhere. However, only half of the library will be saved: everything from after 1950 is not interesting enough to preserve, according to minister Bussemaker. This is evident from the answers given by Culture Minister Bussemaker to questions by the SP.
Because everything that smelled of modern culture had to go from the previous cabinet, the new cabinet has been peddling collections that perhaps should not be thrown out with the rubbish after all. Collections, built up over decades by the now defunct institutes, are being housed at a university (the theatre library of the TIN), in a yet-to-be-built MegaMuziekenDansPaleis in The Hague (music library broadcaster), at the Nederlandsche Bank or so again at a university, this time Leiden's (Tropeninstuituut).
Only part of the library built up by the latter institution will be preserved: only the part that falls under 'heritage' will be allowed to remain. And heritage, that is apparently everything from before 1950. So anything stored after that is modernist junk and can be thrown away, unless a single party still finds something of its liking among them, such as the medical books.
Bussemaker on that: 'For the post-1950 collection, there does not seem to be sufficient interest for the time being to maintain a library function with a national and international task of collecting, accessing and making available literature from and about developing countries and subjects.'
History, too, is demand-driven, it seems. Otherwise, it is a matter of grabbing what you can grab: 'That does not alter the fact that KIT as owner takes its responsibility and is still in full discussion with all serious acquisition candidates to preserve (parts of) the post-1950 collection permanently for the Dutch public. For instance, the medical part of this collection will be housed in Urk at the Knowledge and Documentation Centre for Medical History. Four thousand books relating to peace and security will go to the Peace Palace in The Hague.'
So the rest will go into the shredder, as storage makes no sense, the minister explains: 'With storage, in no time anyone will know what is in containers full of books. Moreover, from a conservation point of view, simply storing the collection is not enough. A collection needs maintenance and must be kept alive to be accessible to the public.'
That last remark remains curious: because storage is expensive and accessibility impossible, we just throw it away. Regardless of whether later generations, with a (different) vision of heritage and cultural history, would be able to do something with it. So we are not throwing away our history, as the Volkskrant headlined, but our future.
Actually.
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