Like last years, this year's bad news was mainly financial. Although most of the considerable budget cuts announced by the ministry of Education and
Science in 1993 were cancelled or at least shelved, ongoing government policy of shifting the burden of unemployment and early-retirement benefits to the workplace continued to erode discretionary spending power, with obvious consequences for the flexibility of Institute policy. In addition, EU national governments increasingly tend to refer grant applicants, especially in the humanities, to Brussels where ever larger numbers are competing for smaller amounts of money. And both at home and abroad grants are presently awarded in a remarkably cautious way. Ambitious or even interdisciplinary projects are suffering as a result.
The good news was that productivity rose regardless. Probably for the first time in out history we indexed more archives than we acquired. The lingering backlog
in cataloguing books and serials, which has existed since the 197OS, has been reduced by about 60 percent over the last two or three years. Changes in our preservation policy proved hugely successful. Research staff published twice or three times as much as the norm set for Dutch university researchers. This was all made possible thanks to the commitment of excellent people, to whom the Institute is deeply grateful.
