The archival records of Blinken OSA Archivum were mostly created during the Cold War period, between 1945 and 1990. The media of that period is analog: the textual records are on paper in archival boxes, moving image and sound collections are mainly on video cassettes, audio cassettes or tapes, and optical media (CD, DVD). These media types of the Cold War period are more in danger in terms of durability than those of the pre-WW2 period. Magnetic tapes and optical media are proved to be more fragile and vulnerable than celluloid-based media (analog photo, analog film). Technical obsolescence—the gradual disappearance of equipment and parts, and of the technician and service staff who keep these machines running—puts analog video and sound recordings on the list of “endangered species.” Hence, the massive, systematic, and scheduled digitization of AV records of over 55 record series in various fonds at Blinken OSA continued in 2022. It is paired with a similarly scheduled processing project. The core functions and duties of the Audio-Visual Unit are to prevent data loss via the preservation of collections and to promote access to the archival holdings for research and teaching.

The members of the AV team in 2022: Judit Hegedüs AV Archivist (50%), Judit Krausz AV Assistant Archivist (50%), Dariusz Krolikowski Digital Preservation Archivist, Kálmán Tarr Audiovisual Archivist (50%), Gergely Jakab AV Assistant Archivist (50%), Lenke Szilágyi AV Assistant Archivist (50%), and Zsuzsanna Zádori Senior Audiovisual Archivist.

Temporary relocation from and back to OSA - May and December 2022

Due to the installation of the new heating and ventilation system in the Goldberger House, the AV team faced manifold and severe challenges:

First, the AV Unit had to vacate one of its two cold storages, which involved relocating roughly 50% of all AV material. Thousands of AV containers: VHS and Beta SP cassettes, DVD-ROM and archival boxes with photographs were put into paper boxes, and moved.

Second, the AV Unit, together with its state-of-the-art “digitization studio,” was temporarily relocated to CEU. The Audio-Visual Team adapted to the new environment and continued with its complex digitization work there. VHS video players, time base correctors, monitors, broadcast equipment of four workstations, and one station with photo scanning devices, were set up and were operated by the AV team to run the digitization work in a “business as usual” way.  An additional workstation was set up to digitize potentially hazardous cassettes.

The equipment used here are not plug-and-go devices. Each item is 20–30-years old and fragile. Thanks to the dedicated AV staff, digitization was not interrupted: all equipment were fixed and serviced. Relocating to CEU in Nádor Street also meant we had to move video cassettes from and to Goldberger House. Archival Information Packages (AIP) of newly digitized video films were created and uploaded into the OSA Research Cloud seamlessly by the IT Department. It was a complex and well-coordinated effort.

Digitization of analog video, sound and photo collections for research and teaching purposes

In 2019, the Audio-Visual Unit decided to prioritize non-European analog records for digitization. Through geographically diversifying its digitally accessible holdings, Blinken OSA wishes to contribute to CEU’s ability to offer primary sources to its students coming from a more and more diverse background. To support digital humanities research and education at CEU, Blinken OSA has, over the past years, made special efforts to facilitate online access to its holdings for students, faculty, and the creative community around CEU. However, due to the temporary relocation to the CEU’s Nádor Street buildings, where the four digitization workstations were all for VHS cassettes, the geographical focus turned back to East-Central Europe again.

Statistics of analog video collections digitized, by record series and media type

As a result of digitizing 1,485 cassettes, another 2,430 hours of archival resources became accessible for research and teaching in 2022.

Analog photographic collections digitized by scanning

Six collections were scanned in year 2022, that included 8,000 negatives and circa 150 paper prints.

• HU OSA 386-2-5 Records of the Physicians for Human Rights' Bosnia Projects: Forensic Assistance Project / Photographs Relating to the Forensic Assistance Project - 4,489 negative frames
• HU OSA 203-13-2 Records of Central European University: External Relations / Communications Office / Photographs Documenting Events and Activities at CEU - 125 paper prints
• HU OSA 206 Records of the Open Society Archives at Central European University: Exhibitions and Public Events / Photo Documentation of Exhibitions and Public Events - 2,897 negative frames
• HU OSA 361-0-15 András Hegedüs Collection digitization of paper prints - 57 items
• HU OSA 362-0-4 Tibor Philipp Collection, digitization of negatives - 621 frames
• HU OSA 462 Photographs of the Dialogue Peace Group (A Dialógus Békecsoport fotói), digitization of paper prints - 29 items

Optical Discs digitized by ripping or data migration

Digitization of DVD-ROM media is to preserve content and to prepare material for processing and cataloging. The media files were pre-processed during their ripping.

• HU OSA 206-2 Blinken OSA’s exhibitions - 64 DVD-ROM, 81 items
• HU OSA 206-3 Blinken OSA public events - 49 DVD-ROM, 81 items
• Further 30 DVD-ROM with staff events and projects were ripped and archived
• HU OSA 206-4 OSA Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival - 27 DVD-ROM, 1985 items
• HU OSA 339-2-1 Judit Kóthy Collection - 12 DVD-ROM, 12 items
• HU OSA 362-0-5 Tibor Philipp Collection - 4 DVD-ROM, 66 items
• HU OSA 453 György Litván Collection - 8 DVD-ROM, 8 items

Creating, enriching and editing descriptive metadata

To enhance discovery, photo, video, and sound collections were intellectually processed. The newly-created metadata were entered into the Archival Management System and published in the Blinken OSA catalog.

• HU OSA 300-1-8 Finalizing the description of Radio Free Europe’s PR photos – altogether approx. 1,000 items
• HU OSA 445-1-1 Translation of András Bozóki’s Hungarian-language Finding Aids and series description into English, thus creating rich metadata for researchers – 182 items
• HU OSA 344-0-1 Processing of the of the Workers Militia propaganda films by annotating them. Editing the Hungarian-language Finding Aids, and translating it into English – 196 items
• HU OSA 394-0-1 Editing the Hungarian-language Finding Aids of the Ministry of Interior Propaganda Films, and translating it into English – 285 items
• HU OSA 462-0-1 Creating bilingual metadata for Dialogue Group’s photos – 29 items
• HU OSA 361-0-15 Creating bilingual metadata for the András Hegedüs photo collection – 57 items

• HU OSA 440-1-1 Creating bilingual, Hungarian, and English description for the Éva Kapitány photo collection. The first 280 rolls cover the regime change in Hungary. Identifying location, dates, and people in the pictures, and publishing the Finding Aids of the photo series will be announced later in 2023 – Over 7,500 items
• HU OSA 440-1-1 Editing and revising the descriptive metadata of the Éva Kapitány photo collection – roll 281 through 468, 5,000 images
• HU OSA 206-2-1 Cataloging by viewing and tagging of the propaganda films of the Ministry of Defence, collected for exhibitions at Blinken OSA – 206 films (container 56 through 271)
• The Film Library’s born-digital film files into Koha library database – 1,012 documentary films. As a result, 5,940 films are there for digital access https://www.osaarchivum.org/content/Film-Library
• HU OSA 362-0-4 Physical processing and describing the paper prints of Tibor Philipp Collection.

Data cleaning and data normalization for uploading resources in OSA's Research Cloud

The Audio-Visual Unit is in the process of normalizing its datasets and metadata. The goal of the two AV Archivists involved is to make more and more pre-2017 digitized photo, video, and sound collections accessible digitally, via the OSA Research Cloud, without needing to visit Blinken OSA in Budapest. As of December 2022, over 15,000 digitized objects are on the OSA Research Cloud, for free and unlimited research, among which over 14,000 is moving image.

Among the consolidated collections are HU OSA 419 Júlia Vajda Interview Collection on Totalitarianism and the Holocaust, where curating was carried out, and accruals were managed.

To further facilitate research at OSA, three new entries were added to the AV landing page

• András Hegedüs photo collection HU OSA 361-0-15
• Philipp Tibor Photos and Negatives HU OSA 362-0-4
• Photographs of the Dialogue Peace Group: Funeral of the Known Soldier HU OSA 462-0-1

Conducting targeted video interviews for contextualizing archival collections (project planning, realization, editing)

On the 50th anniversary of the first sociological survey about the Roma population of Hungary, conducted by István Kemény and his team in 1970–1971, Blinken OSA’s AV Unit committed to recording so-called targeted video interviews with those who took part in the survey 50 years ago. This is to contextualize valuable source material at Blinken OSA related to István Kemény, Pál Schiffer, and their colleagues’ work, life, and archival collections. Sociologist János Zolnay was commissioned as the interviewer, and the first two of the six interviews were recorded with Kálmán Rupp and Gábor Havas. The edited versions of the videos will be published online, while the raw material will serve as background material for researchers.

Video documentation of public programs, creation of graphic design and video work for social media and other platforms

The AV team’s Archivists often double as cameramen, editors, designers, and livestream maestros. They recorded and edited videos for various platforms, including Panopto, screens at CEU, and the Blinken OSA YouTube Channel. The following list is to capture, in chronological order, the various creative work the AV Unit was involved in.

January 18, 2022 Records Uncovered 2.0: Opening Speeches (2022)

January and February 2022
An intensive six-week archival internship in the framework of the History of Public Sphere program took place, with the participation of 16 students, in four groups. Besides organizing workshops and other learning activities, the AV team assisted the students in graphic design, video shooting, and editing, and served as project consultants.

March 16, 2022, FEARLESS SPEECH
The AV Unit edited each video for the monitors at the Fearless exhibit.
They also shot, edited, and published the video of the opening ceremony and other events. The work also included streaming.

Award Ceremony of litera.hu – My Story of Cowardice (2022)

March through May, 2022
Accompanying the Fearless exhibition at Blinken OSA, 18 events took place, and videos were produced by the AV team to document them. The raw, unedited footage of The Tree of Truth is archived and will be available for further research.

May 4, 2022
Recording of the roundtable discussion of the film My Love, Elektra in the context of fearless speech.

April and May, 2022
Designing, editing, and finalizing content for the Blinken OSA screen in CEU’s Quellenstrasse building:

June, 2022
For the Night of Museums, the AV team has edited a video, and documented the guided tour in the Nádor Street building complex.

May through July, 2022 Editing video and creative content for the Yugoslav Archive Project (YAP), including design, editing, and publication.

September through November, 2022
Four Visegrad Grant Presentations at Blinken OSA were recorded, edited, and published by the AV Unit in Panopto.

November, 2022
Providing technical assistance at the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, by streaming sessions at Toldi cinema.

Cultural program to commemorate the writer Zsolt Csalog

October 11 to 14, 2022 A four-day program was held to commemorate Zsolt Csalog. Csalog, writer, sociologist, and member of the democratic opposition in Hungary, died 25 years ago, on July 18, 1997, at the age of 62. Blinken OSA, the Roma Civil Rights Movement, and the family joined to honor Zsolt Csalog’s work and legacy with a series of events entitled Csalog25. The four-day program, curated by Zsuzsa Zádori, took place in three different locations. As part of the program, together with the literary portal litera.hu, Blinken OSA launched a contemporary literature competition titled DOKU’22.

Maintenance and purchase of playback equipment

Most newly-purchased equipment are old, hard-to-locate play-back devices. They are to be used during the analog video digitization, as the majority of Blinken OSA’s AV holdings are video cassettes of various sorts. As newly-purchased digital/analog BetaSP players, SVHS players, and Time Base Correctors arrive, AV team members are to fix, clean, and maintain them.

The CEU Media LAB in Vienna has discarded some of its old, out-of-date equipment. Blinken OSA was happy to take three iMacs, three pc. of 4k video cameras, three tripods, one sound recording set, one GoPro, one set of lighting equipment over into its AV Lab. They could serve well at archival internship projects: CEU students can use lab devices for their archival media editing work. Felhasználandó foto: students interns camera work at osa.jpg

In 2022, most of the basic library activities in Blinken OSA have been organized in such a way that we could continue to operate smoothly during the temporary move. Duplicate publications were donated or scrapped, collections were reorganized; however, we also progressed with projects that started in the previous year.

Records of 730 periodicals and 710 books were added to our catalog: among others, we processed a major Czech- and Slovak-language press collection, and the book donation of Anatole Shub.

The scanned issues of Budapest Week, the first independent English-language weekly in Hungary, founded in 1991, that remained in printing until 2000, were processed, and its photo archive was partly described in HU OSA 463-2-2. Two days before the move, on May 12, the former editors of Budapest Week, Michael Kovrig, Pablo Gorondi, and Tom Popper, gathered for a public talk to discuss what starting an English-language newspaper in Budapest was like in 1991, and to consider whether such a publication would even be possible to launch today. The video of the event is available here: https://www.osaarchivum.org/press-room/announcements/the-budapest-week-then-and-now-from-now-on-available-online

This year, we received smaller donations from private donors: Hungarian samizdat publications from Júlia Széphelyi, and Hungarian and Romanian political posters of the 1990s from Chris Springer. Our colleague, Márk László-Herbert, enriched the library with his carefully selected books on everyday life in cities, on urban space, and on psychogeography. We also accepted Russian-language monographs from the CEU Library, which completed our unique archival heritage relating to the world of Russian prisons and the Gulag system.

Working together in the same office with fellow librarians at the CEU Budapest campus resulted in deeper understanding of each others’ work. We managed to better harmonize the interlibrary and intercampus loan procedures, the regular data migrations between our library catalogs, as well as the collection development routines.

In October, we organized a professional visit for Emilia Karjalainen, who works for the Slavonic Library at the Finnish National Library. Since both institutions are attracting the same community of researchers, the Finnish colleague was especially interested in Blinken OSA’s collections and projects. We hope that the result of her visit will be a long-term cooperation between the Archives and the Slavonic Library.

Our Fearless exhibition was accompanied by an important literary competition. The Litera portal and the Archives issued a joint open call, titled My Story of Cowardice. The work of the jury and evaluation of the submissions were carried out together with renowned literary figures. This competition was the most popular of Litera’s previous applications: 284 short stories were submitted to the call.

In 2022, we participated in several professional events, including CIVICA presentations, the BIBFRAME conference (Hungarian National Library, September 20–21), and the Semantic Web in Libraries conference (SWIB14, online, November 28–December 2).

The Records and Information Management Services (RIMS) at Blinken OSA preserves the institutional memory and history of the Open Society Foundations (OSF) network, and provides recordkeeping consultancy services to the Foundations’ institutions. As the official archive of Central European University (CEU), Blinken OSA also provides archival and records management services to CEU’s administrative offices, academic departments, research centers, and academic support units, as well as preserves the university’s records of historical value.

With regard to OSF offices and foundations, Blinken OSA’s RIMS has focused primarily on managing the network’s active and semi-active records. Although not considered strictly a records and information management task (as none of the OSF entities operates in Hungary anymore), the RIMS team shifted its focus to the collection and preservation of OSF’s historically valuable documents. The global network with its geographically dispersed foundations and offices constitutes a real challenge for the understaffed RIMS team.

In 2022, the two-person team continued to support CEU’s and OSF’s primary business activities by maintaining four records centers mainly storing semi-active records of CEU units (academic departments, administrative offices, research centers); by serving the entities’ records transfers and records retrievals in both paper and electronic format; by digitization for retrieval purposes; and by carrying out the regular records destruction. In addition, in 2022, the RIMS team collected and transferred photographic images of CEU to the Archives for long-term preservation.

Due to the so-called “Lex CEU,” Hungary’s amended higher education law, CEU was forced to move its degree programs to Vienna. The relocation of the academic departments and several administrative units added new aspects to the challenges of the RIMS team’s work. Due to the nature of records management, there are tasks that require in-person meetings and the physical presence of records managers at the affected unit’s work area. In order to perform specific tasks more effectively, the records managers will need to visit the Vienna campus more frequently in the future.

In 2022, the RIMS team continued to conduct onsite meetings and consultation sessions with CEU units that remained in Budapest. In the summer and fall, the team worked with CEU Library’s Budapest staff. The discussions helped identify records created, received, and maintained by the unit. Based on the information acquired, the RIMS team will recommend the records categories and retention periods for the updated Records Retention Schedule.

As a consequence of selling CEU’s Október 6. Street building in Budapest—including an underground three-story archival storage equipped with an archival mobile shelving system—new records centers and archival storage facilities have to be created. In 2022, the RIMS team and other Blinken OSA staff spent considerable time working closely with the CEU Facilities Management on planning the new storage area and giving advice on special archival and record storage requirements. In the second half of the year, the RIMS team was heavily involved in helping CEU Facilities in selecting new archival shelves for the new storage area in Budapest. Although the storage capacity of the new area is only a third of the old one, thus the university lost two-thirds of this professional storage possibility, it is gratifying that, in addition to providing storage place for CEU’s semi-current and historical documents, a part of Blinken OSA’s other storage needs are also covered here. To protect archived materials from various hazards and to guarantee long-term preservation of the Archives’s holdings, Blinken OSA aims to ensure a suitable storage environment for the coming decades.

The RIMS team also continued this year to supervise archivists and assistant archivists in selecting and processing the vast Soros Foundation–Hungary collection. Last year, 12 pallets of documents (238 crates) were processed and described. As a result of this pre-processing assignment, the documents were reboxed into 696 archival boxes containing 22,562 folders in total, while their contents were registered and described. Regarding CEU’s long-term and permanent records, the RIMS team regularly archives students’ academic records, which are to be kept for 80 years as required by law. Last year, RIMS staff archived 1,712 CEU course syllabi received from the CEU Library in paper format.

Due to the structural transformation of the OSF network, several national and regional foundations must archive their records accumulated over the past decades. The RIMS team had several consultation meetings with OSF staff from Eastern European, Central Asian, and Western Balkan countries. Personal visits have already begun to assess the quantity and type of their documents, as well as to prepare a work plan tailored to the needs of each foundation.

Another of the RIMS team’s major CEU-related archival projects was their contribution to Blinken OSA’s audiovisual unit’s work, describing CEU’s digitized photo negatives. As a result of a time-consuming but exciting research, the RIMS team managed to create sufficient bilingual metadata (titles, descriptions) for approximately 90% of this collection. After finishing the (negative roll-) container-level description, it will be a challenging but rewarding project to describe the images on (frame-) item-level as well.

Besides supervising interns and assistant archivists in their processing of records, as well as providing records management-related and archival consultations to affiliated organizations, the RIMS staff also contributes to archival and records management courses and trainings. Last year, however, there was no archival course with a records and information management section organized.

As part of its professional development, the RIMS team participated in the online sessions of ARMA InfoCon 2022, a conference for records and information management and information governance professionals to learn new technology solutions and best practices. The team aims to ensure that CEU’s electronic records are managed at professional standards, and will therefore investigate whether Microsoft 365’s records management feature could be an appropriate solution for the university.

The Visegrad Scholarship Program – An Academic and Intellectual Forum

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA program brings scholars and artists to Blinken OSA since 2010 from all over the world, besides the regular inflow of CEU students. The program works in two ways: it supports research based on Blinken OSA’s collections on a competitive basis, and, due to the specificities of the sources, builds a scholarly community interested not only in particular themes related to the Cold War and its aftermath, but in the very trustworthiness of Cold War-era texts and discourses as reflected in the selected media and political protagonists’ documents preserved at Blinken OSA. The research conducted at Blinken OSA was therefore organized in such a way as to be conducive to bigger collective reflections on the issues of knowledge-production and truth regimes in contested times. The thematic calls and the one-to-one academic and archival consultancy sessions organized for each fellow had gradually fostered an academic and intellectual forum where associated questions about truth and evidence were being constantly raised.

The academic coordinators of the program gave a new twist by organizing in October 2021 a conference where former fellows and other researchers were invited to reflect together on conceptualizing and solving the methodological issues of working with Cold War era-related sources. The call was also framed to connect past contentious ideological issues to current “post-truth”-era problems and the growing skeptical relativism. Instead of a volume of conference proceedings, a more unitary and focused journal issue was deemed to be the proper result of the conference. The authors of selected papers were invited in 2022 to re-work their paper and re-submit them to a journal issue. The project is ongoing.

New Call in 2022: Lessons of the Cold War?

After the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, a new call has been launched, the objective of which is twofold: it is humanitarianly open to Ukrainian scholars and Russian refugees of conscience and, at the same time, it is meant to re-evaluate past Cold War themes and sources in the light of the present war. In such tragic circumstances, it is not just Blinken OSA as a welcoming community that is open to people in need. Soviet-era sources inaccessible otherwise in the current context can be found at Blinken OSA: samizdat documents as well as regional newspapers that were published both in Russian and in local languages (Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz). Central Asia has uncannily become the focus in applications to the Visegrad and other scholarship programs at Blinken OSA.

Some remarkably interesting projects and presentations followed:

Blinken OSA as a Growing Research Hub

The integrated Visegrad program offering full-funded grants, systematic consultancy, professional feedback, prospects for academic publishing and artistic research, and possibilities for collective original work, has attracted an increased attention to the program in 2022. The number of applications has grown during the last five years, and therefore the Visegrad Fund has agreed to increase the number of grants at Blinken OSA from 15 to 20 per year. In 2022, after the war started, Blinken OSA received 52 applications from 25 countries, and 15 full grants were awarded (in addition to four smaller grants). In a single application round from November 2022, we received almost as many applications as we received throughout a single year five years ago (when we had three rounds of applications). The spectrum of applicants got also diversified, with new applications coming in from Peru, Argentine, Iraq (in addition to the regular inflow of applications from Europe and Central and Eastern Europe). In their motivation letters addressed to Blinken OSA, applicants mention that they are familiar with the Archives due to their former status as CEU students, social media outreach (30%), recommendations by their academic supervisor (especially mentioned by US applicants) and other Blinken OSA teaching and public programs. Blinken OSA’s grant visibility grows and builds not only on the enriched research program, but also on the multifold activities that contextualize and make the archival sources known and relevant.

Publications that made extensive use of Blinken OSA materials or that were written by former Visegrad fellows are listed on the Archives’s website, including articles and books recently published by:

Marco Gabbas. “The Birth of Soviet-workers dissidents.” Labor History, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 353-371, DOI: 10.1080/0023656X.2022.2104827. (In the words of the author: “the pleasant and insightful conversations I had with my academic advisors at OSA helped me shape the project.”)

Armen Grigoryan. “The war in Ukraine and historical revisionism.” New Eastern Europe, May 23, 2022. Online publication.

Irina Gordeeva. “Solidarity in Search of Human Agency: ‘Détente from Below’ and Independent Peace Activists in the Soviet Union.” Labour History Review, 86 (3), pp. 339–368.

Lovro Kralj. “Populism, Memory Politics and the Ustaša Movement 1945–2020.” In Memory Politics and Populism in Southeastern Europe, edited by J. Jensen, London: Routledge, 2021.

Piotr Wcislik. Dissident Legacies of Samizdat Social Media Activism: Unlicensed Print Culture in Poland 1976–1990, London: Routledge, 2021.

Academic Coordination of the Visegrad Program

Since 2020, Ioana Macrea-Toma has been the academic coordinator of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. She moderates the sessions where Visegrad fellows present their end-of-the-fellowship work, and conceptualizes the program’s outreach and thematic calls . After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 2022’s call was changed to Lessons of the Cold War?, inviting scholars and researchers to re-evaluate past Cold War themes and sources in the light of present war.

In the summer of 2022 Ioana was conducting archival research for completing an article on science based epistemology, meaning the interplay between mathematics and dissident political radicalization in communist Romania, and for editing a journal issue on Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives.

Access to Archives: Study for the Council of Europe

Ivan Szekely, in cooperation with colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, such as Dr. Michael Friedewald, Murat Karaboga, Greta Runge, and others, conducted a large-scale, pan-European research on the current state of access to archives. When in 2003–2004 the first such investigation took place with the participation of the (then) Open Society Archives, the main research question was whether archives in the Member States of the Council of Europe (CoE) comply with the newly adopted Recommendation No. R(2000)13 on a European policy on access to archives, the first international legal document in this area, with special regard to newly democratic countries of Europe. The results of the first research was published in the Handbook of Access to Archives, written by Charles Kecskemeti and Ivan Szekely, and published by the CoE in English and French. The main question of the current research was whether the compliance with the Recommendation, and the practice of access to archives in general, have changed during the last two decades. A further purpose of the research was to explore the use of new information technologies in the archival institutions, as well as to identify the challenges and possible solutions in this area.

In order to make the two investigations comparable and to measure the changes that took place during the past years, the structure of the new study followed that of the original, with necessary minor changes, but also included a new chapter reflecting the use of new technologies in archives and the changed expectations of the users of archives. Data collection was conducted in October 2022. The three target groups: archival institutions, professional users, and NGOs, may have, as they had 20 years ago, different opinions and experience in the subject of the study, and the overall situation can only be evaluated on the basis of these positions and experiences. The first analysis of the data was included in the report written for the competent bodies of CoE. The subsequent analyses will prospectively be completed and published in professional journals from 2023 on.

Our study may assist archival institutions to improve their services, legislators and regulators to remove legal and regulatory obstacles from access to archives, and professional and lay users of archives to demand better conditions for access to paper-based, audiovisual, and electronic documents alike. In a broader sense, our study may assist the competent bodies of the CoE to revise and update the Recommendation itself, and include new provisions reflecting the practices of contemporary archives.

Research on Sovietization in Hungarian Theaters

As Archivist at Blinken OSA and a theater historian, Balázs Leposa obtained his PhD degree from the University of Theatre and Film Arts in November 2022. His thesis interprets the early experiments of theatrical Sovietization in Budapest, 1948–1955. The thesis includes five reconstructions and analyses of Hungarian theater plays as case studies to exemplify various aspects of the theatrical Sovietization and at the same time typify the performances of the era. First, in connection with The Miser by Molière, he examined the role of the performance as an electoral campaign, i.e. the Sovietization of the spectators. Secondly, he examined the Socialist Realist reading and interpretation of Shakespeare in the production of Othello and its directives on its theatrical realizations, i.e. the Sovietization of interpretation. Thirdly, in the analysis of The Heroes of Everyday Life by Éva Mándi, he explored the peculiarities of the new Hungarian schematic drama, i.e. the Sovietization of the drama. Fourthly, in the case of The Breakup by Boris Lavrenyov, he presented the results of par excellence Sovietization, the results of the Soviet director's cooperation with the Budapest-based company for the first time, i.e. the Sovietization of the company. And finally, analyzing the performance of The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, he explored the possibility of synthesizing Sovietized and Hungarian bourgeois theater traditions. The thesis includes an important chapter related to the materials at Blinken OSA, which were researched, digitized, and published as an online curated collection of Blinken OSA, titled Cold War Theater Collection.

The Cold War Theater Collection was published in 2021, the launch was supported by a public discussion with theater historian Magdolna Jákfalvi and researcher at the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security Tamás Szőnyei. The collection itself generates a quite impressive traffic (50+ users per month), articles appeared in the Hungarian press and lectures were held related to the collection. PhD and undergraduate students of (the former) University of Theater and Film Arts were contacted, who then started archival research at our institution.

Merging the knowledge and experience of a historian with the knowledge and infrastructure of an archive could and have to be a unique possibility to show not only the paradigmatic ways of using primary sources but should be the core of the verifiability of any research. In a theoretical way, the presentability of sources makes the historian’s work trustworthy and transparent. In the near future, Cold War Theater Collection 2.0 will be published; predictably, the values listed here will play a more prominent role.

Research on Voting Behavior

Gábor Tóka’s research activities in 2022 focused on the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election on the one hand, and on data collection, processing, and analysis for a book manuscript on the other. This book is meant to synthesize the scholarly literature on voting behavior regarding the emergence and persistence of programmatic linkages between voters and parties, with an original and unusually broad cross-national and longitudinal analysis providing empirical illustrations and tests of key propositions.

The book project has important synergies with Gábor’s work on developing an archive of post-1989 public opinion research data about political attitudes and behavior in Eastern and Central Europe, and permits showcasing the value of such a collection. The empirical and theoretical motivation of the book project stems from a glaring gap in the political behavior literature. At the micro-level, it has been extensively explored when and how issue voting occurs and to what extent it can contribute to democratic linkages of responsiveness and accountability between citizens and their elected representatives. However, the macro picture about cross-country and over-time differences, and consequently about the dynamic determinants of such linkage, remains quite confusing.

The forthcoming book involves co-authors for the various chapters, and aims to explore causal sequences from political institutions, party behavior, political communication routines, news media reporting on politics to voting behavior and back. A key chapter that highlights links between how changes in the quality of democracy over time correlate with the waning and strengthening of programmatic linkages in different issue domains was presented at an international conference in August. A subsequent presentation at the American Political Science Association conference in September 2022 was canceled due to an unexpected visa problem and will be remedied in 2023.

Sabbatical and Book Manuscript

In January 2022, Csaba Szilágyi completed his sabbatical at the University of Amsterdam, where he spent five months doing archival and desktop research on custodial practices related to, and art projects and artistic performances based on, archival sources on the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. This was part of a larger research project on the roles, responsibilities, and limitations of archives/archiving in creating knowledge about and transforming memory politics relating to the 1991–1995 wars in Bosnia, which continued throughout 2022. A chapter from his PhD dissertation and a co-authored chapter (submitted November 2022) in an edited volume on post-conflict remembrance in Southeastern Europe contain the preliminary results of his research.

This year, Oksana Sarkisova completed the book manuscript based on her long-term collaborative research project on family photography and the aftermath of the Soviet century in multi-generational families in Russia. The manuscript, authored together with Olga Shevchenko under the title In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos, explores the photographic images’ singular power to capture a fleeting moment, by approaching them as points of contestation and possibility. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and interviews, as well as internet ethnography, media analysis, and case studies, In Visible Presence offers a rich account of the role of family photography in creating communities of affect, enabling nostalgic longings, and processing memories of suffering, violence, and hardship. Together, these photos evoke youthful aspirations, dashed hopes, and moral compromises, as well as the long legacy of silence that was passed down from grandparents to parents to children.

The book is contracted by MIT Press and is scheduled to come out in 2023.

Research Connected to Curatorial Activities

Besides individual research work on a scholarly research topic, members of Blinken OSA staff, at times in collaboration with external contributors, do serious research in Blinken OSA’s holdings, as well as in various external sources, during the preparations of exhibitions and other public programs.

Anastasia Felcher contributed to exploring, reviewing, and selecting Blinken OSA materials related to LGBT themes in preparation for the exhibition Records Uncovered 2.0. She also explored, reviewed, and worked through Blinken OSA materials related to selected Soviet dissident personalia in preparation for the Fearless exhibition. Anastasia also did research for her conference presentations and publications, exploring Blinken OSA materials related to Moldova in 1980s and 1990s and the armed conflict in Transnistria, as well as on the collapse of the USSR and the period of transition and transformation.

István Rév, the initiator and conceptual leader of the Fearless series of events that started in the fall of 2021 and lasted until May 2022, selected and analyzed the last lectures of French philosopher Michel Foucault, which dealt with the problematics of truth, the fearless expression of truth, and the relationship between the individual and truth. He was the curator of the Fearless exhibition, organized in the Galeria Centralis at Blinken OSA.

Most of the documents in the exhibition came from the rich collections of Blinken OSA, trying to present as much original sound material as possible in the original language (with translations and summaries). The exhibition was divided into six chapters and an important interlude:

1. The problem, concept, and origin of fearless speech;
2. The courage to speak without fear;
3. (Intermezzo: What is truth?);
4. Censorship, self-censorship, and samizdat;
5. Fearless speech from the perspective of the secret police;
6. Freedom of speech, fearless speech, and the fragile relationship between democracy and freedom of expression;
7. The right to truth.

In addition to routine cooperation in the form of joint fellowships and projects with other research and teaching units of the Central European University (CEU), including the Democracy Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study, Blinken OSA carried out exchange programs and events with a variety of external partners. (These are described in more detail in other chapters of this annual report.) True to its openness towards professional, academic, and cultural progress and innovation, as well as its cooperative and hospitable spirit, the Archives teamed up with institutions and organizations ranging from research universities and centers to independent artistic collectives, LGBTQI+ organizations, and to Central Asian filmmakers and memorial centers.

As a research center of CEU, Blinken OSA, represented by Csaba Szilágyi, participated in Work Package Three of the CIVICA Research alliance’s project on surveying archival infrastructures and policies, and identifying complementarities in collections of leading European research universities, such as the European University Institute (represented by the Historical Archives of the European Union as WP leader), Science Po, Bocconi University, the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, and The London School of Economics. Beyond recording the status quo, the final report formulated based on the survey’s findings recommendations on enhancing cooperation between the partners in integrating archives in the core university curricula, archiving digital born records, and research data management.

Later in the year, Katalin Dobó continued to work in CIVICA Research by collaborating with the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). This program was aimed at exploring and promoting CESSDA infrastructure, resources, and services among scholars.

Supported by Erasmus Mobility travel, Oksana Sarkisova visited the Communication and Media Studies Department of Carlos III University of Madrid to explore possibilities of sharing best teaching practices and devising modes of professional cooperation with the Head of the Department, Concepción Cascajosa Virino, and Pr. Sonia Garcia Lopez.

Furthermore, Oksana participated in the First Central Asian Film Forum, and took part as mentor in the First Film Critics’ Workshop at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek. The cooperation designed for offering novel format of training for young film critics will continue within the framework of the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Budapest.

Fellows from the Cold War Archives Research Institute of the Wilson Center had their by now regular week-long study visit organized in the Archives’ research room in late spring. During their stay, the 15 BA, MA, and PhD students from prominent universities across the globe, such as the London School of Economics, Stony Brook University, George Washington University, MIT, University of the Philippines, Sapienza University Roma, or the Graduate Institute in Genevea, were assisted in their research and mentored by the Archives’s staff on daily basis.

In June 2022, Judit Hegedüs and Márk László-Herbert visited and had professional exchanges with archivists and curators from about a dozen archives in Amsterdam, the Hague, Rotterdam, and Hilversum. The on-site collection viewings, discussions, and public presentations took place within the framework of a Visitors’ Program organized by DutchCulture on behalf of the government of The Netherlands, and supported by Creative Europe.

In October 2022, Katalin Dobó organized a professional visit for Emilia Karjalainen from the Slavonic Library at the National Library of Finland. The aim of the visit was to initiate a long-term professional cooperation between the libraries of the Archives and CEU, and the Slavonic Library.

During the Fearless series of programs, Blinken OSA cooperated with CEU’s Borderless Knowledge open lecture series in organizing a well-attended podium discussion on the reality, risks, and limitations of free speech.

Other events within the same project were implemented in collaboration with the Freeszfe Society, a state-independent artistic space aimed at preserving the 155-year-old tradition of the University of Theatre and Film Arts, Budapest (SZFE). Among other contributions, they co-published a call for applications for theatrical performances, which were evaluated by a joint jury consisting of Kinga Szemessy, László Upor, Tibor Csizmadia, and Jakab Tarnóczi from Freeszfe, and Balázs Leposa from Blinken OSA. The awarded productions, Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle by the theater group of Orsolya Fodor, and The Tree of the Truth, a premiere by the Cipolla Collectiva were performed before full-house in the gallery space of the Archives. By means of continuing this fruitful cooperation, the latter will be performed again, followed by a new premiere in the Archives’s Arany János street building in 2023.

As a follow-up to previous joint work with the Háttér Society’s Archive and Library, Blinken OSA organized in its gallery the Records Uncovered 2.0 exhibition on LGBTQI+ histories in Central and Southeastern Europe (1945–1999), under the co-curatorship of Perica Jovchevski and Péter Hanzli. Together with Csaba Szilágyi, the team also visited QWien, a research center, library, and archives for queer studies, where they also met with the director of the Queer Museum Vienna, and discussed possibilities of cooperation, exchange of archival sources, and the prospects of showing the Records Uncovered 2.0 exhibition in Vienna.

Blinken OSA joined the Yerusha online platform of the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, a network of over 690 prestigious archives and institutions of social memory on Jewish history and culture across Europe. To put its relevant collections on Jewish life under Socialism in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the focus of international research, the Archives, under the guidance of Anastasia Felcher, contributed 23 collection descriptions to Yerusha’s continually growing database.

In 2021–2022, Iván Székely lead a pan-European study on the state of access to archives in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. The study was commissioned by the Council of Europe, similarly to the first such study conducted in 2003–2004 in cooperation between the International Council on Archives and Blinken OSA, represented by the late Charles Kecskeméti and Iván Székely. After discussing and adopting the final report on the results of the study in early 2023, it is expected that the Council of Europe will further use the expertise of the leaders of the study in the process of updating and amending the Council of Europe’s recommendations in the cultural sector.

Gábor Tóka continued his ongoing collaboration with the Policy-Based Political Representation: A Multi-Method Analysis of Legislative Work, News Content and Surveys (2021–2023) project of the Median Research Centre, Bucharest, in collecting and archiving surveys of political attitudes and Romania in 1990–2020. The project is supported by the (Romanian) Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development, and Innovation Funding (UEFISCD).

Throughout 2022, the archival consultancy work of the Archives for the Srebrenica Memorial Center Archive, represented in this three-year program by Csaba Szilágyi, continued with joint professional visits with the Bosnian colleagues in Budapest and memory institutions in Germany. It concluded with the International Expert Meeting co-organized with PAX and held in Potočari at the end of the year. (For a detailed description of this cooperation see the chapter Critical and inclusive archiving for social justice and solidarity.)

In 2022, Blinken OSA’s core budget, about 1.2% of the total operating budget of Central European University, comfortably covered the Archives’s basic professional operations. The slight overrun in the non-personal category was amply compensated by the savings in the personal category, where some posts remained vacant for shorter or longer periods.

For the past 16 years, this budget has been complemented with an annual grant from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), against appropriate application and on condition of regular reporting. These two financial pillars make it possible for Blinken OSA to implement all its records management and archival activities relating to both the Open Society Foundations network and the Central European University campuses in Budapest and Vienna, its extensive processing and digitization operations, and its mission-related public programs for students and researchers, as well for the general public.

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA grant scheme started in 2010, bringing in €34,500 for Blinken OSA annually, out of which 15 full grants of €2,000 each are awarded every year. Grants for shorter periods are pro-rated. In 2022, the Director and the Deputy Director of the International Visegrad Fund paid a visit to Blinken OSA, and made an offer to increase both the number of scholarship holders and the amount of the scholarship, which had remained unchanged since 2010. From 2022 on, Blinken OSA offers 20 full grants of €2,700, bringing in €60,000.

In the years between 2010 and 2022, 228 Visegrad Scholarship at OSA grants have been awarded, with applications arriving from over 50 countries across all the five continents. The list of the most researched topics and the publications of Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Fellows between 2010 and 2022 based on their research in the Blinken OSA collections is available at Statistics Illustrated 2010-2021 | OSA Archivum.

Blinken OSA’s civic engagement project, which supported the teaching of English to students at the Ambedkar school, came to an end in 2022. The closing event was attended by students, teachers, and the Archives’s staff, as well as Visegrad Fellows.

2022 was marked by recovery after the pandemic, during which we had to decide whether there were elements of operating during a pandemic that we needed to preserve. The number of trips increased again, but the lectures, presentations typically took a hybrid form, increasing the need for state-of-the-art technical equipment and software.

The changing institutional and academic environment due to the move of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna put additional strain emotionally as well as practically on the community of Blinken OSA. The relocation to Vienna siphoned off many of the students working in the Archives, reduced the number of on-site student and teacher researchers, and also disrupted the academic research atmosphere surrounding Blinken OSA. This constant uncertainty has had an impact throughout the year, both on the well-being of colleagues and on the physical and financial framework of the institution.

Nevertheless, in 2022, the number of interested students visiting Budapest from Vienna increased and a joint education program was launched with several units in Vienna. Blinken OSA, putting all its financial resources to good use, managed to cover all its archival and records management tasks and public programs activity, including the 19th edition of its Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

In 2022, however, life at Blinken OSA was dominated by the temporary move from the Goldberger building, which was necessary due to renovation work. The expense relating to the renewal of the cooling-heating system of the building was entirely covered by the central budget of the Central European University, which also covered the costs of the Archives’s move to and stay at the CEU Budapest complex for 10 months.

In the new situation, Blinken OSA faced new challenges, especially in the area of online education and the online searchability of its collections, having devoted a significant part of its external funding to digitizing its collections and making digitized material available online. These objectives were implemented with the leadership of Blinken OSA’s newly appointed Chief Archivist, a position finally filled in after long periods of being vacant.

At the end of 2021, the staff of the Archives numbered 43, although this figure fluctuated over the months, as some new colleagues were only contracted for a definite term. Out of the 43 colleagues, 13 had short fixed-term contracts, 1 was on IT payroll; the core staff counted 29, out of which 18 worked on a full-time basis. The full staff came from 8 countries.

Tasks that the core staff could not pick up and that could not be handled by the technological developments, were covered by externally contracted service providers, externals, interns, and CEU students, on fixed-term employment contracts. Because of the temporary move from its “home,” in 2022, Blinken OSA concluded only four short-term external contracts and one Erasmus student exchange agreement.

In order to make all of the Archives’s operations transparent and easy to follow, Blinken OSA circulates the OSA Weekly listing the events of the week, the monthly Management Meeting Brief, a summary of the Management Meeting, and after the monthly Staff Meetings the Staff Meeting Minutes. The bi-annual Financial Reports, which are followed by the Open Finance Days, where reports and operational invoices are open for the inspection of the staff, also serve the purpose of transparency and open communication.

Fellowships

Blinken OSA has a long history in offering different types of fellowships, should these be research grants for current Masters and PhD students, individual researchers, exchange students, artists, journalist, or even groups of researchers dedicated to certain research agenda. To date, the Archives has awarded over 1,300 grants.

Currently, Blinken OSA offers only three support schemes, out of which the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA, awarded jointly with the International Visegrad Fund, supports 20 researchers a year for a two-month research period each, and the Aaron Swartz Fellowship supports one successful candidate a year (in 2022, the Aaron Swartz Fellowship was not awarded), and the Hoover Archives Research Assistance Scholarship, offered jointly with the Freedom Broadcasting Foundation (formerly the RFE/RL Fund), supporting distant-research in the Hoover Archives. The latter was dormant for a long period for reconstruction works running in the Hoover Archives, and is to reopen under a new name, which will commemorate one of its founders, Ross Johnson.

The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA saw many more researchers in 2022 than awards for the year, because sixteen candidates could not start their research in time due to the pandemic. In 2022, Blinken OSA saw 28 Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Fellows in total. The list of successful candidates and their research reports can be accessed here.

In 2022, the Archives was involved in two OSUN-driven incentive programs. In total, six research fellowships and two fellowships for threatened scholars were awarded, one to a Russian refugee researcher and one to a Ukrainian researcher who is not allowed to leave the country due to the war situation.