Samuel Muller’s finest hour: the Dutch archivist at the International Congress of Archivists and Librarians in Brussels (1910)

The article deals with the participation of Samuel Muller Fz. (1848-1922), a Dutch historian and archivist, in the work of the International Congress of Archivists and Librarians held in Brussels in 1910. Samuel Muller was one of the authors of the first archives administration textbook published in the Netherlands in 1898. The participants of the Congress called Muller “the teacher of us all” and elected him Chairman of the Archive Section of the Congress. He spoke on many issues discussed at the Congress: the methods of the provenance principle application in classifying documents; archives’ publishing activity; public policy towards private archives; interaction between private and state archives; formation of economic data archives; archivist training; etc. Samuel Muller’s practical experience and theoretical views determined the course and outcomes of the debates on many archival problems as well as the decisions and acts of the Congress. The discussion of the theoretical and practical issues of archives administration at the international level has become an important milestone, determining the direction of scientific archival thought for many decades. For the first time, forms of international cooperation of archivists of different countries were found, and that turned out to be a notably significant result of the Congress in Brussels, the Congress itself becoming the precursor of the International Council on Archives that was established after World War II.