Open Society Archives

Last updated
Open Society Archives
Nyílt Társadalom Archívum
OSA Archivum logo.jpg
Established1995
Location,
Affiliations Central European University
Website http://www.osaarchivum.org

Open Society Archives (abbreviated as OSA) is an archival repository and laboratory that aims to explore new ways of assessing, contextualizing, presenting, and making use of archival documents both in a professional and a consciously activist way. [1] It was founded by George Soros in 1995, and opened in 1996 as a department of the at the Central European University. [2] In 2015, OSA was renamed Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (abbreviated as Blinken OSA) after receiving a major donation from the couple. [3]

Contents

Its archival holdings relate to post-war European history, the Cold War, the history of the former Eastern Bloc, samizdat, the history of propaganda, human rights, and war crimes. OSA is also the archive of the global activities of the Open Society Foundations.

OSA also functions as a teaching and research department of the Central European University and offers MA and PhD courses on the theories and methods of archives, evidence, human rights, documentary cinema, twentieth century history, and the politics of the Cold War. [4]

OSA is located in central Budapest, in the Goldberger House, which was originally built in 1911 as a textile warehouse, and later functioned in the 1980s as the “dollar shop” in Budapest, where goods could only be purchased with hard currency. [5]

The building now also incorporates a gallery space, Galeria Centralis, [6] which hosts OSA's public programs, exhibitions and conferences.

Holdings

Stamps produced by the Polish underground in the early 1980s, held at OSA Archivum Budapest OSA Polish samizdat stamps.jpg
Stamps produced by the Polish underground in the early 1980s, held at OSA Archivum Budapest

OSA curates, preserves and makes accessible multilingual collections in over 40 languages spanning the period from World War II until the present, with a global geographical coverage but special focus on East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

OSA’s acquisition policy aims to collect and preserve the documentary heritage of civil society, human rights movements, transnational and intra-governmental organizations, social and protest movements, and the personal papers of known oppositional figures and social activists. From its inception, OSA has assisted in rescuing endangered collections, and plays a bridging role in making scattered documentary legacies of communities and supranational organizations researchable. By introducing open access principles in the region since 2002, OSA continues to support and initiate projects about freedom of information, freedom of speech, access to information and open standards.

Cold War

The original core of OSA’s holdings is the former archives of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, previously based in Munich and New York. These include RFE internal research publications produced to support the national broadcasting desks, transcripts of central broadcasts from RFE/RL’s target countries, [7] [8] [9] anonymized interviews with eastern European émigrés and travellers, almost all daily papers and magazines published in or about Eastern Europe between 1951 and 1993, records and transcripts of Eastern European radio and television programs and other supporting materials used for daily broadcasts. The successor to the RFE/RL Research Institute, the Open Media Research Institute, also donated its collections to OSA, thus OSA preserves one of the largest mass media operations of the twentieth century from 1951 till 1997.

Other Cold War holdings include special collections on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 1956 Refugees, documents and sound-recordings on the activities of the UN Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, [10] intelligence material gathered by former State Security agencies of the Eastern Bloc, [11] paranoia, [12] [13] and Eastern European samizdat publications including underground materials from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. [14] [15]

OSA acquires materials from international organizations such as Foundation for the Support of European Intellectuals, which provided grants to build intellectual networks during the Cold War. [16]

OSA holds the personal papers of a number of prominent former opposition or exile figures, including General Béla Király, Gábor Demszky, [17] György Krassó, János Kis, [18] László Rajk, and Iván Pető, and the personal papers of international experts such as Alfréd Reisch and David S. Rohde.

In 2012 OSA acquired the materials of the Hungarian Institute for Public Opinion Research, [19] the only public opinion research institute to operate in a Soviet bloc country. [20]

OSA’s holdings also include extensive collections of textual documents, documentaries and moving images of the transition after the fall of the Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe, and of the afterlife of Communism. These include collections of home movies, [21] home movies on Srebrenica, [22] and video recordings of alternative culture in Hungary in the early 1990s. [23]

Human Rights

OSA’s holdings relate to human rights in general, and grave violations of human rights in particular, and include the archives of the London-based periodical Index on Censorship, [24] the International Human Rights Law Institute Relating to the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia, [25] the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, [26] and the Office of the High Representative, the body that oversaw the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina. [27] OSA also holds documentaries, amateur videos and propaganda films, comprising several thousands of hours, compiled by the International Monitor Institute to document human rights violations and genocide, [28] and video recordings produced by the New York-based human rights group WITNESS. [29]

Open Society Foundations

OSA acts as the official archive of the Central European University and Open Society Foundations organizations, among them the Open Society Institute Budapest, International Science Foundation, Cultural Initiative Russia, Forced Migration Project, Soros Foundation Hungary, and West Balkan Open Society Foundations. Other OSF-related activities include the maintenance of the global digital repository of the network, and offering consultancy services on recordkeeping, data curation and digital preservation to all OSF entities and projects.

Digital Holdings and Curated Collections

OSA's digital repository [30] contains, among other collections, over 117,200 items on former Eastern Bloc history from 1951 to 1994, including RFE/RL collections recently placed online as part of Europeana's Heritage of People's Europe project, [31] funded by the European Union.

The archive offers digital collections curated and supplemented by the OSA staff. Among these is the virtual exhibition 1989: Lesz-e? ("Will There be a 1989?"). This exhibition contains almost 10.000 items (photos, videos, textual pages, audio materials) made by or connected to the year 1989, and Hungarian regime change. [32]

Access

OSA promotes an open access policy and does not limit access to its collections on the basis of citizenship and profession. [33] Its reading room, both the online and the physical, is open to all visitors. OSA strongly supports the use of materials through digital reproduction and offers a digitization on demand service. [34]

Library

OSA’s non-circulating Library [35] holds books and periodicals in over 40 languages covering the period 1950 to the present, which relate to its archival holdings. The Library consists mainly of the library collection of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Open Media Research Institute, and donations from individual and institutional partners. It includes publications from and about Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as books and journals from Western countries about the history, culture, and politics of the region. The Library also contains around 40,000 newspapers and journals on microfilm and microfiche.

OSA’s Special Library collections include the London-based Wiener Library's Testaments to the Holocaust collections on the history of Nazism and the European Jews, [36] the Prague Spring 1968 collection, Polish Independent Publications, US Government documents on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Publications.

Galeria Centralis

Don exhibition opening at Galeria Centralis Don exhibition opening.jpg
Don exhibition opening at Galeria Centralis

Galeria Centralis is an exhibition and screening hall that hosts OSA’s exhibitions, conferences and public events. The space is used as a platform for turning the archive inside out, bringing archival materials to the public’s attention, and by contextualizing the available historical evidence, initiating public debates on questions of social and historical importance.

Notable recent events include The Trial, [37] a historical reconstruction commemorating the 50th anniversary of the secret trial and execution of Imre Nagy and co-defendants in 1958, for which OSA publicly broadcast tape recordings of the 52-hour-long trial in real time. [38] [39]

Exhibitions include an exhibition on the sixtieth anniversary of the disappearance of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, [40] which included a reconstruction of Wallenberg's office in the Swedish Embassy in Second Life, [41] a public reconstruction based on forensic and exhumatation data gathered in the course of researching the Bosnian Serb Army's 1995 Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys, [42] an exhibition exploring the contemporary reception on the sixtieth anniversary of the restoration of Northern Transylvania to Hungary under the Second Vienna Award, [43] and an exhibition marking the seventieth anniversary of the Hungarian Second Army's defeat by the Soviets at the River Don. [44]

In 2021, OSA co-organised an online exhibition with Háttér Archive entitled Records Uncovered. [45] The exhibition focuses on the gay and lesbian movements in Central and Southeastern Europe between the mid-1940s and the early 1990s. [46]

Projects and public engagement

OSA initiated the annual Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, [47] and has a rapidly growing global collection of human rights documentary films. OSA is also the initiator of the annual celebration of 100-year-old buildings in the Hungarian capital, Budapest 100, [48] [49] the amateur photo archive Fortepan  [ hu ], [50] and a co-initiator of the Diafilm virtual filmstrip museum. [51]

In 2014, OSA's main public program was the Yellow-Star Houses project, [52] focusing on the remaining 1,600 former yellow-star houses in Budapest which, from June 21, 1944 until the establishment of the ghetto in November 1944, were designated compulsory residences for Jews, and marked with a yellow-star. Using traditional archival research and contemporary mapping and crowd-sourcing technologies, the project marked the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary, and aimed to involve the contemporary residents of the city in exploring this lesser-known chapter of Budapest's history.

OSA is one of the initiators of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, one of the original signatories of the Open Document Format Alliance, [53] and the founder of the Parallel Archive, [54] a digital humanities tool where researchers are encouraged to digitize, tag, comment, and make publicly available the documents they find in OSA’s holdings. In 2010, OSA ‘leaked’ thousands of previously classified documents from its holdings relating to the Cold War conflict on the Parallel Archive. [55]

OSA also participates in the Voices of the 20th Century Archive and Research Group, [56] led by the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in cooperation with the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary. [57] The project analyzes how different types of interview material can be enhanced through digital technologies and re-used for further research.

Together with the International Visegrad Fund, OSA also awards a number of research scholarships every year. [58]

Prizes

In 2010, OSA Archivum was awarded the Joseph Pulitzer Memorial Prize in the History of the Press category. [59]

Related Research Articles

Foreign relations of Hungary

Hungary wields considerable influence in Central and Eastern Europe and is a middle power in international affairs. The foreign policy of Hungary is based on four basic commitments: to Atlantic co-operation, to European integration, to international development and to international law. The Hungarian economy is fairly open and relies strongly on international trade.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty US-funded international broadcaster

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is a United States government-funded organization that broadcasts and reports news, information and analysis to countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus and the Middle East where it says that "the free flow of information is either banned by government authorities or not fully developed". RFE/RL is a private, non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent government agency overseeing all U.S. federal government international broadcasting services.

Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. The group's name is inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.

Hungarian Revolution of 1956 1956 citizen rebellion in socialist Hungary; brutally repressed by the USSR

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, or the Hungarian Uprising, was a nationwide revolution against the Hungarian People's Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from the 23rd of October until the 10th of November 1956. Leaderless at the beginning, it was the first major threat to Soviet control since the Red Army drove Nazi Germany from its territory at the End of World War II in Europe.

Central European University Private Research University based primarily in Vienna

Central European University (CEU) is a private research university accredited in Austria, Hungary, and the United States, with campuses in Vienna and Budapest. The university is known for its strength in the social sciences and humanities, low student-faculty ratio, and international student body. A central tenet of the university's mission is the promotion of open societies, as a result of its close association with the Open Society Foundations. CEU is one of eight members comprising the CIVICA Alliance, a group of European higher education institutions in the social sciences, humanities, business management and public policy, such as Sciences Po (France), The London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), and the Stockholm School of Economics (Sweden).

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) was a self-governing group of non-governmental organizations that act to protect human rights throughout Europe, North America and Central Asia. A specific primary goal was to monitor compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act and its follow-up documents.

Corvinus University of Budapest

Corvinus University of Budapest is a university in Budapest, Hungary. Corvinus University of Budapest is a research university oriented towards education. The university currently has an enrollment of approximately 11,500 students, offering educational programmes in business administration, economics, and social sciences, operating in Budapest and Székesfehérvár since 1948.

Lívia Járóka Hungarian politician

Lívia Járóka is a Hungarian politician of part Romani ethnicity. She is a Member of the European Parliament, first elected as part of the Fidesz list in 2004. Járóka is the second Romani ever elected to the European Parliament; the first was Juan de Dios Ramírez Heredia from Spain, who served from 1994 to 1999.

Katalin Bogyay

Katalin Annamária Bogyay is a Hungarian diplomat, 15th Permanent Representative of Hungary to the United Nations in New York. She is the former Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary and Permanent Delegate of Hungary to UNESCO (2009–2014) and the President of the 36th session of UNESCO General Conference (2011–2013).

Romani people in Hungary

Romani people in Hungary are Hungarian citizens of Romani descent. According to the 2011 census, they comprise 3.18% of the total population, which alone makes them the largest minority in the country, although various estimations have put the number of Romani people as high as 12% of the total population.

Hungary has provided registered partnerships to same-sex couples since 1 July 2009. This institution offers nearly all the benefits of marriage. Unregistered cohabitation for same-sex couples was recognised and placed on equal footing with the unregistered cohabitation of different-sex couples in 1996. However, same-sex marriage is prohibited by the 2011 Constitution of Hungary, which took effect in January 2012.

Artpool Art Research Center is an archive, research space, specialist and media library in Budapest, Hungary, dedicated to international contemporary and avant-garde arts, such as Artist's books, artistamp, mail art, visual poetry, sound poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, installation, performance.

Háttér Archive is the oldest and largest LGBT+ archive and library in Hungary. It is a unique LGBT+ collection in Eastern Europe. It is an integral part of Háttér Society, located on the premises of the association. Háttér Archive was founded by Sándor Nagy, who - together with his colleagues - collects gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender etc. materials since the founding of Háttér Society in 1995 - with a special attention to LGBT+ history.

Fourth Orbán Government

The fourth government of Viktor Orbán is the current Government of Hungary since 18 May 2018, after the 2018 parliamentary elections.

Judit Sándor

Judit Sándor is a Hungarian lawyer, bioethicist, and author, as well as full professor at the Department of Political Science, Department of Legal Studies and the Department of Gender Studies of the Central European University (CEU), Budapest. She had a bar exam in Hungary before she conducted legal practice at Simmons & Simmons in London. In 1996 she received Ph.D. in law and political science at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Éva Bednay Hungarian painter (1927—2017)

Éva Bednay was a Hungarian painter, known for her mixed-media work which employed layering of paint and lacquer, often incorporating pieces of metal, plastic and textiles. Trained in Budapest, she lived in the United States in the early 1970s before settling in Bonn, Germany. In 2009 an exhibition of her life's work was hosted in the suburb of Wassenaar in the De Paauw Palace by the Hungarian and Germany Embassies. The following year, Central European Cultural Institute in Budapest hosted the first retrospective of her works in her home country since the early 1980s. She has works in public collections in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as paintings in private collections.

István Rév

István Rév is professor of history and political science at Central European University in Budapest and director of the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives. He is member of the Open Society Foundations Global Board.

Black Box was the first independent documentary videomaking group in Communist Hungary and one of the most important chronicler of the regime change in 1989. It was founded in 1987 by Judit Ember, Márta Elbert, István Jávor, András Lányi and Gábor Vági. The group distributed their documentaries on VHS tapes which were referred to as issues of a video magazine.

Bulletin "V" was a Samizdat human rights publication produced in Russian and circulated in the Soviet Union in 1980-1983. Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the socialist Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, passing the documents from reader to reader. This grassroots approach to evading official Soviet censorship was dangerous, as people caught with censored materials were frequently subject to harsh punishments.

Radio Free Europe/Free Europe Committee - Encrypted Telexes

Radio Free Europe/Free Europe Committee- Encrypted Telexes is a digital curated collection available for research at Blinken Open Society Archives. This is the Cold War collection that has been processed, described, and partly made accessible online by Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. The collection arrived from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University in 2014. It consists of 101 microfilm reels that remained after the original paper material was destroyed after subsequent microfilming. Upon arrival to Budapest the microfilm reels were digitized, creating more than 111000 electronic files. The collection contains three types of primarily corporate but also valuable historical documents. The Free Europe Committee President's Office materials were produced by the Presidents of the Free Europe Committee with decisions they made between the 1950s and 1970s. Attached to these documents is a waste body of encrypted telexes that were daily exchanged between RFE headquarters in Munich and New York. The third body of archival materials concerns RFE engineering department with rather technical issues including daily frequencies of the radio programs, atmospheric conditions, radio transmission, jamming, and other issues. Once processed, these historical records will shed more light on the US’s Cold War initiative to combat Soviet influence and distortion of information in Eastern Europe. OSA hopes that the public access to the new FEC digital collection will contribute to the better understanding of the trans-Atlantic connections, émigré aspirations, the operation of Radio Free Europe and finally the FEC institution per se as valuable resources for further scholarly research on the Cold War era.

References

  1. "About Us". Open Society Archives. Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  2. Mink, András (1999). "The Open Society Archives: a brief history". In Pudlowski, Leszek; Székely, Iván (eds.). Open Society Archives. Budapest: Open Society Archives at Central European University. pp. 30–31. ISBN   963 85230 5 0.
  3. "OSA was renamed Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives". Open Society Archives . 12 November 2015. Retrieved 21 May 2021.
  4. "Our Courses - OSA Archivum" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  5. "Goldberger House - OSA Archivum" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  6. "Galeria Centralis - OSA Archivum" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  7. "Radio Free Europe Information Items". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  8. "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Background Reports". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  9. "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Situation Reports". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  10. "United Nations Special Committee Documents on the Problem of Hungary in 1956". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  11. "Digitális Állambiztonsági Archívum" . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  12. "Paranoia Recycling Archive". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  13. "Paranoia Archive". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  14. "Polish Underground Ephemera". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  15. "Polish Underground Periodicals". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  16. "OSA Acquires the Archives of the Foundation for the Support of European Intellectuals (FEIE) - OSA Archivum" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  17. "HU OSA 302 Gábor Demszky Personal Papers". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  18. "HU OSA 355 János Kis Collection of Hungarian Samizdat and Documents of the Democratic Opposition". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  19. "HU OSA 420 Collection on the Hungarian Institute for Public Opinion Research". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  20. "TK 3.0: Did People Lie in Kádár's Hungary?". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  21. "Hungarian Home Movies". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  22. "Srebrenica Home Movies". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  23. "Rodolf Hervé Videos on Hungary's Alternative Scene in the 1990s". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  24. "HU OSA 301 Records of Index on Censorship". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  25. "HU OSA 304 Records of the International Human Rights Law Institute Relating to the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  26. "HU OSA 318 Records of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  27. "OSA Signs Public Archive Agreement with OHR". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  28. "HU OSA 350 Records of the International Monitor Institute". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  29. "WITNESS Videos". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  30. "Digital Repository". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  31. "Seven RFE/RL Collections Now Online At Open Society Archives". 24 June 2013. Retrieved 2021-05-12 via Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
  32. "1989: lesz-e?". Open Society Archives.
  33. "Access Policy". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  34. "Digitization on demand service by Blinken OSA - Policy". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 25 May 2021.
  35. "Library - OSA Archivum". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  36. "Testaments to the Holocaust. Documents of the Wiener Library". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  37. "The Trial". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  38. Origo. "Hangemlékmű a Nagy Imre-per ötvenedik évfordulóján" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  39. István Rév, 'Mivégre az archívum?', Élet és irodalom, June 13, 2008 (link in Hungarian)
  40. "Raoul Wallenberg - One Man Can Make a Difference". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  41. "Raoul Wallenberg's Office in Second Life". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  42. "Srebrenica - Exhumation". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  43. "Restoration - Northern Transylvania, 1940". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  44. "Don - A Tragedy and Its Afterlives". Open Society Archives . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  45. "Records Uncovered: Gay and lesbian histories in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1945-1999". recordsuncovered.osaarchivum.org. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  46. "Records Uncovered: Gay and lesbian histories in Central and Southeastern Europe, 1945-1999". recordsuncovered.osaarchivum.org. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  47. "VERZIO Film Festival" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  48. "100 Year-Old Buildings in Budapest" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  49. A guide to Europe's best arts events in 2013, The Guardian, February 1, 2013
  50. "Fortepan" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  51. "Diafilm" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  52. "Yellow-Star Houses" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  53. http://www.odfalliance.hu/hu/index%5B%5D
  54. "Parallel Archive" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  55. András Iván, 'Gondolatolvasókkal fürkészték volna a szovjeteket', Index, December 28, 2011 (link in Hungarian)
  56. "Voices of the 20th Century - Archive and Research Group". Voices of the 20th Century . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  57. "What is NAVA". National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary . Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  58. "Visegrad Scholarship at the Open Society Archives - OSA Archivum" . Retrieved 13 September 2016.
  59. "OSA Newsletter 2010" . Retrieved 2021-05-12.

Further reading

Coordinates: 47°30′09″N19°03′12″E / 47.5025°N 19.0534°E / 47.5025; 19.0534