Blijden, Duzanson working to
preserve the island’s archives
PHILIPSBURG--Making the government archives, which include records circa 1974 and older, more accessible to government personnel and the general public, while still coping with the daily operations of government, is the Herculean task Louis Duzanson and Alfonso Blijden of the Island Government General Affairs Department have set for themselves.
The two men have been cataloguing the large volume of documents in Dutch, French and English related to government decisions and correspondence into a more user-friendly system for sometime now. A special coded system is used to file the documents to facilitate easy retrieval.
While the addition of the archive library to the Government Administration Building almost two years ago has helped with this task, the manpower in the department is not sufficient to achieve a fast filing and cataloguing of the items along with the execution of daily tasks of support to the government apparatus.
From time to time, the department has students on work study attached to it, but these youngsters often carry out day-to-day tasks, as archiving requires some training and skills. Persons with the necessary skills who are willing to volunteer their time to the archive are welcome to set up an appointment with either of the two men.
Blijden told The Daily Herald their work to preserve the documents for posterity was part necessity and part love. Due to the lack of sufficient manpower and the necessary preservation tools, sometimes the team is only able to preserve the documents that are in danger of being damaged or lost.
One form of preservation applied at the archive is the digitising of old manuscripts, law books and other documents, which makes it easier for information to be retrieved. This also protects the old document from being improperly handled.
Duzanson added, “The main concern is the day-to-day activity of government. Preservation is done when we have time or there is a need to preserve. To preserve the documents takes time and personnel and it is a task that you have to love to get involved in.”
One document with pertinent historic significance to today that was recently unearthed is the correspondence from the commandant of the French side to the Dutch side authorities about the escape of the slaves from Diamond Estate to the French side in 1848 when emancipation was proclaimed there.
The document was discovered when Blijden was requested by the Culture Department to look for information on slavery. The information was passed on to the department and may have played a part in the planning of the upcoming re-enactment of Diamond Estate 26 Escape set for the Cole Bay border point on June 30 at midnight.
The correspondence was originally in French and was translated to Dutch and handwritten into the logbook, from which Blijden extracted the relevant details connected to the escape.
Blijden is researching information on the salt factory at Foga on request of archaeologist Jay Haviser, who will be in St. Maarten from August to commence a two year excavation of the area in Sucker Garden.
The law books cover legislation locally, from the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba and the Netherlands. The oldest law book goes back to 1863 and the oldest one that is still used for reference on almost a daily basis dates to 1919 and deals with the burial of people on the island.
The government archive comprises mainly official documents and to make this a more complete representation of the time period it covers, Blijden has started a project to collect copies of old photograph of the island and its people. For this he has been meeting with the older community elders.
He is also calling on persons with collections of old photos who are will to share them to contact him at the government building. The photos will be scanned and returned immediately. In the future, Blijden and Duzanson would like to have some of the photos adorning the walls of the archive room.
With the new government building planned for Pond Island, there are plans for a properly temperature-controlled and larger archive room that will help to extend the lives of the historic documents and copies of laws.
Another Herculean task the two men have set for themselves is having the archives, which include many boxes still to be catalogued, filed so that the move when new building is completed is seamless, so the functioning of this vital government department can continue its work without interruption.
There is a significant backlog of documents to be filed and this cannot be cleared up easily, as the space in the archive room is limited. A proud achievement for the team is that retrieving of needed documents is now timely, but they are still aiming to try to cut down the search time to mere hours.
Despite the wealth of documents and information the archives preserve, there are government personnel who are unaware that the archives exist and can help them in performing certain tasks, Duzanson said, adding that he hoped to see this change when the new building was constructed, as part of the problem arises from fact that the offices are scattered throughout Philipsburg.
Aside from huge task the two men have taken on, it is noteworthy to mention that Blijden is an accountant by profession who has been with the department since 1987 and has attended workshops and courses to help guide him in the role of an “archivist” of sorts.
The most significant one to date was held in Curacao some 18 months ago and was facilitated by the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage (ICCROM), which is based in Rome. Blijden was one of only 16 persons who were chosen to take part in the three-week course that was attended by persons from Aruba, Curaçao, Chile, France, Nevis, the Bahamas and the United States, amongst other countries.
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