Radio Netherlands World Broadcasting no longer exists. The subsidy was withdrawn because no one in the VVD knew what it was: shortwave. And because the PVV, which was also in government at the time, finds everything scary that contains the word 'world'. Bad for those who miss calls from the ANWB emergency centre at breakfast for the Alpenkreuzer, even worse for expats and other people in foreign countries who were happy with their radio contact with that small country in the north-west of Europe.
And now the archive has also been 'cleaned up'. Last week. The radio archive is still somewhere at find, but everything written by journalists in the 65 years of the World Broadcasting Corporation's existence has been dismissed rather violently. We got wind of this today thanks to twitter. Our friend Joop Daalmeijer, now boss of the Culture Council but once boss of World Broadcasting, called us in when a journalist reported via twitter that RNW's text archive had disappeared.
@WimAEJansen @jacqwess @RNW Can anyone take action against this? @nvj @ImagesSound @Pressmuseum @culturepress @MinOCW
- Joop Daalmeijer (@JoopDaalmeijer) January 26, 2015
We took Joop's question as a challenge, and so made a quick call to World Broadcasting, which now no longer has .nl after its name, but .org. Because they are probably completely fed up with .nl. And don't blame them, with all those Martin Bosmas of ours.
Finally. Waiting for a reply took a while. But when the spokesperson opened her twitter account in our presence, people woke up anyway. And so a reply arrived, via email. From the director. We quote:
"Last week, RNW had to take the decision to take the old website rnw.nl off the air. This website was the last one still referring to the 'old' World Broadcasting Corporation, which ceased to exist as of 2013. The new organisation RNW can be found via the website www.rnw.org and has very different content, related to its current mission: to promote free speech in countries where freedom of expression is severely hampered.
Since the cutbacks, the new organisation RNW has made every effort to house its history properly. Collections such as the music library and part of the audio archive have now been moved elsewhere. Part of the online archive, including 17,000 English-language articles but not everything, has been moved to the new online environment.
Archives cost money. Unfortunately, RNW cannot afford to fully maintain its archives at the expense of its current reduced budget. Moreover, it leads to confusion about RNW's activities.
Access to some of the content was provided through the rnw.co.uk website and with the closure of the site, public access to the material has been blocked. We regret this and we feel sorry for the former colleagues who produced the material, but it is a direct consequence of the major cutbacks in the organisation. RNW will try to meet specific requests to make material available in exceptional cases, for example for scientific reasons."
Since we have the internet, more is stored than ever. But more is also lost than ever. Every day, an equivalent of the mythical library of Alexandria of texts, images, sounds, and other data disappears. Because nobody knows the file format anymore (wordperfect, anyone?), or because the disks they are on crash.
Is that bad?
Yes.
Archives are one thing, access is another. The Theatre Institute Netherlands archive is preserved, but not really maintained anymore, and only difficult to access. The same goes for the National Music Archive. Piles of manuscripts are shredded or lying rotting in a cellar somewhere, until two hundred years from now someone will care and will curse at our shameless handling of our own memory.
Fortunately, there is Google's 'wayback machine'. I advise those affected to make use of this and copy everything there. You can search here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130101000000*/http://rnw.nl
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
