Education for Librarianship in the Netherlands

Abstract

WHILE THE UNITED STATES is one of the largest and one of the most powerful nations in the world, it is most fortunate that more and more Americans are abandoning isolationism and provincialism and that they realize that a great big world exists beyond U.S. borders. It is also fortunate that American librarianship has promoted this trend and that within its discipline it now also looks at what is happening beyond U.S. boundaries. Since 1971 the Directory of the Association of American Library Schools lists as a distinct subject area international comparative Articles about library education in various foreign countries are beginning to appear more often. There now is a refreshing interest in libraries and education for librarianship in foreign countries.1 Around 1965 great changes took place in the Netherlands, both in what I like to call pre-library school education and in education for librarianship itself. Secondary education in Holland was thoroughly revised and reorganized in the 1960's and so was training for librarianship. It is my impression that these new courses were well charted and that the Dutch will follow these for a long time to come, except perhaps for minor revisions. Before going into the Dutch system of education, it is important to say a few words about the country itself. With only 13,433 square miles of territory, it is very small, especially in the minds of people from very large nations such as the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union. Yet no one should be fooled by its small size, because

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.