Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)

(Introduction)

In harmony with the directives of the Minister of Culture as supreme supervisor, the demands of the upkeeping organs and the character and possibilities of the repository, the archives take part in general education as well. At the beginning this kind of work was based on individual initiative of the archivist, restricted to giving lectures in popular education. However, later the special archival methods of general education have developped ever more, among them the most significant one, the arranging of exhibitions or the participation in their arrangement. Self-standing representative exhibitions were arranged mainly by the Hungarian National Archives. So in 1956 it presented the most valuable pieces of Hungarian archives at the occasion of the bicentenary of its foundation, in 1963 the archival sources of agrarian history at the occasion of the International Round Table Conference held in Budapest, in 1964 "The Treasures of the National Archives" in the Hungarian National Museum, in 1969 the Klapka papers received as a gift, etc. But also some regional archives took praiseworthy initiatives in this respect. (At Sopron, Kaposvár and Szekszárd, where suitable archival premises are at hand, major archival exhibitions were organized at several occasions.) At more important historical anniversaries or for the illustration of notable historical figures the archives organized major or minor exhibitions, chiefly hand in hand with other institutions (mainly museums), but also as self-standing enterprises. Thus at the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Councils' Republic in 1919 the archives cooperated in several hundreds of exhibitions, the number of the visitors totalling several hundreds of thousands in the country

. The home or chamber exhibitions of the archives of the councils are partly presentations of centrally allotted reproductions completed by local material (so recently at the occasion of the 150eth anniversary of Petőfi Sándor's birth, or of the 125th anniversary of the 1848 revolution and fight for freedom), partly attached to local (village, school, enterprise, etc.) jubilees. Both the national and the local papers and educational periodicals publish popular studies of our archivists, based on archival sources. Equally often give archivists similar lectures in cultural homes, the Budapest Radio and local studios. In the series called "Let's Remember the Past" the Hungarian Radio gave successful reports on all general archives. (These noteworthy texts have been published by the Archival Review regularly.) The students get acquainted with the written sources of the past first of all by visits to the archives. The number of group visits to archives totals nationally several hundreds. Recently several archives undertook to patronize