Blinken Open Society Archives

The original core of Blinken 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, thus Blinken 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]

Blinken 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]

Blinken 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 Blinken 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]

Blinken 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]

The archival 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] Blinken 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]

Blinken OSA acts as the official archive of the Central European University and Open Society Foundations (OSF) 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.

The 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 Blinken 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]

Blinken 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. Blinken OSA strongly supports the use of materials through digital reproduction and offers a digitization on demand service.[34]

Blinken 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.

The 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.