[en] A fast and reliable procedure was developed to routinely measure the abundances of up to about 35 elements even in small (< 1 mg) samples. Depending on the type of samples they are either irradiated for about 8 hours at a flux of about 2*10¹²n*cm^-2*s^-1, or up to 100 hours at a flux of about 6*10¹³n*cm^-2*^s-1. As standards, high-purity synthetic multielement standards and well-characterized geological reference materials are used. Synthetic standards are used as primary standards because they have several advantages over secondary (geological) standards. Three to four counts are done on each sample, starting 1-3 days after the end of irradiation. High-purity germanium (HpGe) detectors were used with high efficiencies and very good energy resolution (1.6-1.8 keV at 1332 keV). To allow high throughput rates fast preamplifiers and gated integrator spectroscopy amplifiers were used with fast fixed conversion time ADCs. The signals are fed into an acquisition interface module (AIM) and via Ethernet into a Micro VAX. To allow better peak deconvolution, 8k spectra are taken where possible. A specially designed annular NaI(Tl) guard detector allows Compton suppression spectrometry. The system uses standard software and was tested with sets of geological standards and has given reliable results for a wide variety of samples, e.g., cosmic spherules in the 30-200 μg weight range. (author) 21 refs.; 3 figs.; 5 tabs