Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives

Location:
Vera and Donald Blinken
Open Society Archives
Arany János utca 32
1051 Budapest
Hungary

Contact:
Tel. +36 (1) 3273250
info[at]osaarchivum.org

Opening Hours:
Monday to Friday 10 am - 6 pm

www.osaarchivum.org

Description: 

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) at the Central European University is a complex archival institution. It is a repository for multilingual archival collections related primarily to the history of communism and the Cold War, and of international human rights movements and violations; a laboratory of experiments on innovatively (re)contextualizing, presenting and making use of archival documents; a research institution dealing with taxonomical, informational and historical problems related to its holdings, reflecting on the social role and obligations of repositories that preserve sources on recent history; and an educational center for studying the validation and use of archival evidence, the changing functions of contemporary archives, and the special methodological problems of dealing with the sources of the fantasies on which the Cold War was constructed.

Cold War Interests: 

OSA preserves and publishes online important Cold War related sources, such as the records of the Research Institute of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the propaganda and training films of the Hungarian Ministry of Interior and Workers' Militia, the Digital State Security Archives, and records on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the regime change of 1989, as well as Soviet, Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian samizdat. OSA regularly creates thematic collections from its holdings, and contributes to and produces physical and online exhibitions based on research done in these sources. It also organizes academic conferences, seminars, and workshops on the history and techniques of information gathering, public mood and opinion research, and the nature and role of propaganda and media manipulation in both East and West during the Cold War.