For our special series on libraries and archives with collections easily accessible online, Peripheral Histories? editor Priska Komaromi spoke to Judit Hegedüs (JH) and Robert Parnica (RP), two archivists at the Open Society Archives (OSA Archivum) in Budapest. The OSA Archivum’s holdings are vast, including 10,000 linear meters, 17,000 hours of audiovisual, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6500+ documentary film titles, and 19,000 library items in 40+ languages, relating to - among other topics- communism, the Cold War, and their afterlives and human rights and social justice. The geographical focus of the holdings is primarily the former Soviet Union and socialist countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. A huge amount of this is available online (or can be made available online on request), and the archive also engages in a great deal of public outreach in the form of exhibitions, film festivals and teaching.
How did you get to your current position? What was your journey into working in archives?
JH: I was first hired as a freelancer for a specific project sometime in the late 1990s, then again in 2008. The second hiring evolved into a permanent job, though in various different positions. I studied English and Russian literature and linguistics and worked as a translator before and had no formal archivist training, so it involved a lot of learning on the job.
RP: When I studied history and archeology at the University of Zagreb in Croatia in the late 1980s, I could not imagine that most of my life would be spent in archives, probably because the experience of that time in traditional archives was mixed and varied from helpful reference archivists to less helpful and suspicious collection curators. At that time, archivists still held great power in deciding the access to archives and archival collections. However, thanks to the “archival turn,” new scholarly paradigms about and within archives emerged that changed traditional perceptions and the functioning of archives. Access to archives and archival collections, including the right to information, broke traditional constraints and opened new avenues for social science research.
My first position at OSA was as a part-time research room attendant, where I interacted with the first researchers and students from Central European University. Soon after, I worked on trauma-related audiovisual materials related to war in the former Yugoslavia. So, I found myself in a new and dynamic archive utterly different from my earlier experiences and decided to stay.
Which of your collections or resources are consulted most frequently by researchers?
RP: Our researcher’s most used and cited collection is that of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute. This extensive collection covers the Cold War in Eastern Europe from the late 1940s to the mid-1990s. It is a unique and multi-language collection with materials originating from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Materials produced by Radios, such as Country Subject and Bio files, Background and Situation Reports, Radio transcripts, witness testimonies, etc., are vital for our researchers. This collection is enormously rich in various topics, including politics, ideology, military issues, dissent, political opposition, revolts, the economy, social issues, art, and culture.
JH: For audiovisual material I would say the Black Box videos (HU OSA 305). This is a huge video collection from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Starting as an alternative to state-controlled media in 1988, the Black Box Foundation engaged in Hungarian politics and cultural events, documenting the visual history of the years prior, during and after the regime change through documentary films, raw footage, and recording television programs. The films of the Roma Media School - an education program to teach deprived Roma young people filmmaking- are also popular.
Do you have any hidden gems in your collections? What do you have that has rarely or never been used by researchers?
RP: I am sure that each of my colleagues in Blinken OSA Archivum has their own “hidden gems” and favorite collections. Apart from the famous RFE/RL Research Institute collection, the so-called “Balkan Monitoring” collection, which consists of several hundreds of VHS tapes produced in a period from 1996-2000, would be for me, and it is still – a hidden gem. During this time, we had colleagues in Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade who pushed the button of their VHS recorders at 7 or 7:30 pm. to record the evening news and the most important events of the day. One can concurrently observe media from state-run televisions, study the news content, and analyze their manipulative nature. Something “breaking news” in one political center was not even mentioned in the other; if it was, it was mentioned at the end of the program. These materials illustrate the full complexity of these three countries’ political and economic transition after the wars but also address specific local problems of post-war reconstruction, human rights, refugees, war crimes, and social and other issues. These materials haven’t been fully utilized, and we look forward to new researchers.
The Electronic Archives of the Communist International (Comintern) have been rarely used. The Communist International materials belong to the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) in Moscow and have only been open to scholars since 1992. The holdings are massive, somewhere between 20 and 25 million pages, and the finding aids for the various sections themselves total more than 20,000 pages and are written in Russian. Consequently, this archive is not easy to explore, primarily due to the application of digital technology from the mid-1990s when digital files were stored on 574 CDs. For this reason, we have one to two researchers – yearly.
Do you have any digital collections at your archive?
RP: Yes, we have a lot of digital collections, and their number is growing. The Central European University’s political problem in 2017 resulted in its expulsion from Hungary to Vienna. In addition to planned digitization, this was the first strong impetus to digitize archival collections so that our students in Vienna could use them at a distance via the Research Cloud. However, with the arrival of COVID-19, these efforts doubled. As a result, digital collections increased the visibility of our institution and our holdings and made collections accessible to a broad range of researchers worldwide.
JH: Yes, both online available without registration, and many more available upon request by registered researchers. The online collections include a range of textual, audio and visual sources, ranging from Hungarian and Soviet propaganda films to Samizdat Sound recordings and Kyrgyz songs. There are also curated collections, available online without registration, which gather primary and secondary sources focusing on specific historical events or phenomena. They include curatorial insights, highlight key resources, and offer enhanced search tools for scholars to explore the materials.
What are the main challenges of managing your archive?
JH: Processing capacity. That is, not enough staff to physically arrange and catalog collections. We have a many-year backlog and new donations/deposits keep coming in.
RP: At this moment, the biggest problem is institutional. Vera and Donald Blinken OSA Archivum and a few research institutes stayed in Budapest when the Central European University relocated to Vienna. We are still a vital part of the Central European University in Vienna. Now, we are in the process of consolidating our institutional relationship for the long term. However, apart from the above, there are even more professional challenges that we need to face in the upcoming period. The application of AI in our daily work, consideration of some vital ethical issues, and implementation of new technologies will be our focus. Also, the challenge is securing continuous resources to finance our public programs.
What kind of public outreach activities does your archive engage in?
JH: The archive does a lot of public outreach, in the form of exhibitions, public talks, film screenings, outreach to secondary school pupils/teaching and the annual Verzió Human Rights Film Festival in November. Twice a year the OSA Archivum also invites applications for the eight week Visegrad Scholarship, which is open to researchers, socially engaged artists and journalists.
RP: From its very beginning, OSA Archivum used public programs not only to reflect on some historical events by preserving the culture of remembrance but also encouraged our academic and local community to encounter sometimes difficult and contentious topics, where our gallery space (Galleria Centralis) served as an arena for free discussion and exchange of ideas, in this less and less open society. Thus, Galeria Centralis became a space where free thinkers, philosophers, poets, and artists find an ‘intellectual and cultural sanctuary’ to preserve and nurture their ideas and works of art. Apart from the engaged art targeting local communities, we are also an archive that gives space to social and other minorities (Roma, LGBT, disabled, etc.). In this way, we became a community archive for marginalized people whose history was not recorded and whose presence remained invisible. A recent exhibition on the emergence of LGBT culture in Hungary is only one example among many. OSA Archivum is also an academic institution where our colleagues teach at various universities, spreading knowledge stored in our collections and spreading professional expertise through the lens of Archival Science. Some other educational programs involved Hungarian teachers and high school students organizing lectures and visits to our storage. Of course, this is a small fraction of similar activities we have conducted in the past few years.
Is there anything you wish more people knew about your archives/collections?
JH: That more people knew about us.
RP: I would like to encourage everybody to visit our new and dynamic website, which is rich in information on our archival collections, exciting projects, public programs, teaching, etc. You do not need to be a researcher to get access to many of our digital files. If you need any film or photos for your study or work, we will use our research cloud to bring digital files into your home.
Further information:
Electronic library search catalogue.
For a few specific topics, staff archivists have compiled thematic guides, cross-sectional digests designed to help researchers navigate the archive’s materials.
Links to digital collections:
The online collections are available online without registration and include a range of textual, audio and visual sources.
OSA’s curated collections, available online without registration, gather primary and secondary sources focusing on specific historical events or phenomena. They include curatorial insights, highlight key resources, and offer enhanced search tools for scholars to explore the materials.