We came across an article in an Observant from 26 October 1989 about the first psychological counsellor for students at Maastricht University by complete coincidence. The counsellor was appointed to help students with “a fear of failure, problems of identity, lack of social skills, concentration issues, conflict with parents, and relationship issues”. It was an immense relief for colleague Deborah Blekenhorst, who had been frantically searching through the physical copies in our archives (heavy, bundled books, each weighing several kilos, stacked high on her desk and riddled with Post-it notes). Because why had they appointed a psychological counsellor for students, how many FTE was it, what were the responsibilities, when was the department expanded (and professionalised), were there waiting lists in the nineties?
You can read all about it next week in our series The times they are (not) a-changin' – alright, maybe not all about it, nobody here has the time to read through every single one of the 19,000 scanned Observant pages from the eighties, nineties and noughties. But we are hoping to cover all the major developments.
You may be asking yourself, why would they search manually? Have they never heard of digitising? Of course, we have! Every article from 2012 to now is available digitally on our website. Every newspaper before then has been scanned by staff at the university library – many thanks – and can be found on a special UB website. The downside: the search function, it’s not very good. So we often choose to search the old-fashioned way instead. And honestly, it’s fun to flick through the pages, you never know what you might come across, such as a piece about Pim Fortuyn. In 1988, he worked for CES, the Centre for European Studies. Part-time, on a two-year contract that he didn’t complete. “He did have new burgundy carpets put in,” it says a little further on.
Browsing through the archive always leads to criticism of the ‘interesting’ language choices (old-fashioned spelling), interesting leads (200 words, where the guideline is 50), interesting layout choices (lots and lots of text, very few pictures). Colleague Cleo Freriks has been looking for the keyword ‘sustainability’ for ages – how has UM tackled this over the last fifty years? She noticed that there was often no follow-up: decisions would be made and reported but the paper never explored the ‘what now’ aspect. And why was so much time spent on stories with seemingly no link to UM? Such as a symposium about the Erasmus programme in Paris. “There is zero mention of what this has to do with UM,” she said. “Good job, Jacques (editor-in-chief at the time),” has become a somewhat sarcastic slogan here.
Bring it on, I say. In thirty years’ time, I’m sure the current Observant team will be given the same treatment: “Good job, Wendy.”
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office