The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)

THE ARCHIVES OF SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTIONS - Open Society Archives by Iván Székely

BY IVÁN SZÉKELY OPEN SOCIETY ARCHIVES T

he Open Society Archives (OSA) is an international archives institution that is located and integrated within the Central European University (CEU), Budapest. The Archives were founded by George Soros in 1995, originally for the purpose of preserving, processing and making the documents of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute available for research. According to the deposit agreement between the Congress of the United States and the Open Society Institute, New York, the documents are property of the USA and are deposited with OSA for the period of fifty years. The holdings of the Archives The collection area of the OSA covers the following three main groups: - The history of Communism and the Cold War primarily focussing on Central and Eastern Europe, including the material of the RFE/RL Research Institute, the collections of Russian and Polish illegal independent (samizdat) publications, Gábor Demszky's samizdat collection, the documents of Open Media Research Institute (OMRI), and personal papers of prominent figures of the former political opposition; - Human rights and human rights movements mainly from the latter half of the 20

th century, among others, the archives of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the documents of the international organization Index on Censorship, the video collection of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY), the documents of the activities of the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in Bosnia, the documentation of the International Human Rights Law Institute relating to the crisis and disintegration of the former Yugoslavia which were collected by the competent bodies of UNO and later presented before to the Hague International Criminal Tribunal; - The philanthropic activity of the Soros foundation network and the work of the Central European University, including the documents of the various institutions that are related to the network e.g. the Constitutional and Legal Policy Institute (COLPI). The audio-visual collections include, among others, news, propaganda, feature films and documentaries of the 1956 revolution, Soviet propaganda