The Archives Act was created in 1995, which ensures access to and maintenance of the governmental archive. The archive of the central government is the National Archive in The Hague. The central government, the provinces and the municipalities currently collaborate in the development of a digital archive infrastructure, which is called the e-Depot. To stimulate the digital accessibility of archives, the Minister of Education, Culture and Science made a development budget of EUR 6.1 million available in both 2019 and 2020.
In 2018, Minister Slob proposed to have governmental documents automatically archived after ten years instead of twenty years. A project team is currently working on the creation of a new bill that includes this proposal.
The Dutch library network consisted of 149 public libraries and 3.7 million members in 2017. The central government approved a new libraries act (Library Service Act) in 2015, which aims to create a centralised and comprehensive network of libraries, both physical and digital.
The Library Monitor 2017 (Bibliotheekmonitor 2017) gives insight into the assets and liabilities of Dutch public libraries and shows that the total of assets were EUR 415 million. EUR 410 million originated from municipalities and EUR 2.4 million from provinces. The national government provides the Royal Library of the Netherlands with an annual budget of approximately EUR 48 million for national tasks such as innovation, the digital public library and the library for people with a reading disability. The additional financial resources were derived from remaining sources, such as membership fees, sponsorships and funds (for example the Royal Library’s Innovation Fund). The current Minister of Education, Culture and Science decided to invest in Dutch libraries: from 2019 onwards, there will be a budget regarding the digitalisation of public libraries (2020-2023) and local accessibility of public libraries (2019-2021). These budgets will vary between EUR 1 million and 2 million. The Ministry will also provide public libraries in smaller municipalities with additional subsidies (EU 1 million each year to be divided) between 2019 and 2021.
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