Blinken OSA’s archival and educational activities were marked by actions, initiatives, and projects prompted by Russia’s unprovoked military aggression in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022. Conducted in solidarity with scholars and students in Ukraine, but with dissidents opposing the war in Russia and Belarus as well, they included participating in scholarships and teaching, providing of professional archival support, and archiving of current and historical content related to (abuses and crimes committed in) the current war and the transitioning of Ukraine in the post-USSR period. As a human rights archive with significant collections on and long-time experience with the heritage of the 1991–1999 Yugoslav Wars, our community reacted immediately and responsibly to the unfolding of a similar human tragedy at the northeastern borders of Hungary.

After having made sure that all our former students, colleagues, partners, and contributors from Ukraine were safe, we managed to secure a short-term emergency research grant for a former intern of ours through OSUN’s Threatened Scholars Integration Initiative for Ukraine, who worked remotely under our supervision, but in unimaginable conditions inside the country. We also offered special internship opportunities for refugee students in Budapest, and participated with lectures, seminars, and workshops, as well as archival guided tours in the Invisible University for Ukraine, a pioneering non-degree teaching program developed at CEU, which ran online with 100+ participants during the spring, and culminated in an in-person summer university course for the best 25 students, organized in Budapest. Building on the success of the inaugural program, another round of courses was offered, this time for 200+ applicants, in the fall.

For several months, we have captured and archived open-source content on the war, and specifically mass violence against the civilian population in territories ran over by the invading Russian military and paramilitary forces. At the same time, we began collecting and exploring our historical sources on the road to independence of Ukraine during and following the dissolution of the USSR in order to create thematic findings aids to all these records and to help understand the roots and some of the possible reasons of Russia’s desperate expansionist politics.

We provided archival support and know-how for colleagues in Ukraine, and further offered our expertise on rescuing and preserving cultural heritage in peril at various international fora.

***

Whether because of the “call of justice” or the duty to remember, archives are morally bound to be hospitable to victims of injustice and include records and voices of those oppressed, dominated, and silenced. Archival knowledge-creation is dependent on the availability and content of relevant records, as much as on the agency and curatorial decisions of archivists, who have the power to mitigate manifestations of injustice and violence originating in the record-creating environment (provenance, authorship), the nature of archival work itself (appraisal, selection, and description are based on informed political choices), and the archivist’s personal engagement with the records. By assigning memory values to records in their care, archivists will favor certain historical sources for knowledge and memory formation about past phenomena, events, groups, or individuals at the expense of others; therefore, we “are responsible in the present for how we narrate the past.” Archives become spaces of political and social struggle for “self-representation, narrative plurality, and rights seeking and promotion.”

Based on this theoretical foundation, Blinken OSA has broadened its collective focus in 2022, and acquired new records that are usually preserved neither in traditional (and especially state-run) archives, nor in community archives, and set to critically reprocess already existing collections that concern disempowered and vulnerable groups and individuals in our society, including refugees, victims of political violence, LGBTQI+ people, ethnic minorities, or people with disabilities.

To name just one such new collection among many others presented in another chapter of this report, the Archives has acquired the records of the International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability (FIMITIC), covering the activities of the organization from 1980–2008. The acquisition, initiated and made in collaboration with a postdoctoral fellow from CEU’s Democracy Institute, was a last-minute rescue of the documents from a covered but open-air storage facility, just before the rainy season started. As a result, the historical records of one of Europe’s foremost disability rights defenders, including legal texts, board minutes, events-related materials, country-specific files, correspondence, publications, and audiovisual materials, are now awaiting participatory processing in the safe stacks of the Archives.

As for records in our holdings, we continued researching and expanding the Archives’ collections on LGBTQI+ groups and individuals in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslavia in the period between 1945 and 2000. This work was a follow-up to an online exhibition on the topic in 2021, entitled Records Uncovered: Gay and Lesbian Histories in Central and Southeastern Europe (1945–1999). With the aim of developing an online, collective archival hub for these records, we began devising a critical archiving methodology to reveal “tacit narratives” about and systemic misrepresentation or silencing of LGBTQI+ people in our archival classification system and descriptions. This included the informed revisiting of already processed, relevant collections, and the enhancing of descriptive metadata according to the specificities and requirements of the topic. We involved (and will continue to invite) representatives of other personal collections or community archives in finalizing this specific methodology for an inclusive and sensitive reprocessing of these holdings, and incorporating donations from partner organizations.

An important step in this process was the opening of the Records Uncovered 2.0: LGBTQI+ histories in Central and Southeastern Europe exhibition, organized, just like in the previous year, in collaboration with the Háttér Society’s Archive and Library. The exhibition was a restructured and expanded version of its online edition, and included newly discovered records documenting the lives of trans-, intersex, or other gender non-conforming individuals during state socialism and the first years of democratic transitions in Central and Southeastern Europe, as well as contributions from individuals and partner organizations, covering mainly the history of LGBTQI+ activism in Poland, Slovakia, and the USSR before the fall of the Iron Curtain. The exhibition also provided an adequate environment for the opening event of the 10th Hungarian LGBT History Month in the gallery space of the Archives, which attracted both local and international audiences. (Further activities on this topic are described in the Partnership and Cooperation chapter of the Annual Report.)

Later in the year, we started another participatory archival project to process socially-sensitive records that fall outside the focus of mainstream archives with the involvement of the affected communities. By this methodologically challenging initiative, we hoped both to diversify our descriptions and make them more precise, inclusive, and culturally relevant, and to promote social justice and self-esteem among the community members.

Within the leadership program of the Romaversitas Foundation, a civil society organization aimed at helping young Romani students primarily in higher education, we launched an internship program to process the Archives’ holdings related to Roma people in Hungary. We hired an intern jointly mentored by both organizations, whose task was/is to arrange and describe the records (including grant letters, final reports, and other correspondence from 1990–2004) of the Autonomia Foundation, a grant-giving agency supporting self-sustainable Romani communities across the country. The program will continue with another five-month stint in 2023.

On a related matter, the Archives, in cooperation with the Hungarian Roma Parliament Association, whose archive is also preserved in our holdings, organized a four-day event of theater, documentary film, contemporary literature, music to honor Zsolt Csalog, a prominent writer, sociologist, and former member of the democratic opposition on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his death.

Similarly to transferring know-how to Ukraine, the Archives continued its consultancy work in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was the key professional expert partner, along with the Dutch peace organization PAX, in a three-year archival and professional awareness project (2019–2022) financed by the government of the Netherlands. The project aimed establishing and developing the Srebrenica Memorial Center (SMC) Archive dedicated to collecting institutional and private records dealing with sensitive issues, among them vulnerable documents, photos, videos, and various objects many often coming from (mass) graves, on and researching the Srebrenica genocide and its aftermath. Professional activities in the last year included the organizing, preparing of, and participating in working visits by SMC Archive staff to Blinken OSA in Budapest (May 2022) and Germany (May and June 2022), as well as in the International Expert Meeting in Potočari (December 2022). By bringing together leading experts, among them archivists, historians, memory scholars, forensic archaeologists, journalists, and representatives of NGOs and associations of victims and survivors, this final program of the project, which included panel discussions, site visits, and social events, helped to position the SMC Archive within a regional and wider European network of similar institutions of social memory.

***

The events and new archival turn that determined much of our operation in 2022 were present also in some of the Archives’ regular activities. The Archives, Evidence and Human Rights course, which incorporates topics on social justice archiving, analysis of archival and digital open-source evidence of human rights violations, memorialization of mass violence in the archival space, access to information, source criticism, or the uses of historical events for political purposes, was offered, quite extraordinarily, twice. Its 20th-anniversary edition ran in the spring, while the 21st in the fall term. A selection of these topics was also offered to media and communication studies MA students in the frame of a new course launched by the Archives in cooperation with the Media and Communication Department of ELTE University Budapest, entitled From Kádár’s Megaphone to the Yugoslav Wars: Archival Sources, Media Products, and Propaganda.

In terms of archival developments, our Research Cloud was enriched with several important new materials. Beyond audiovisual recordings including footage on war crimes and human rights abuses in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and unique photos on the Hungarian peace movement in the late 1980s, ca. 300,000 pages of digitized text materials also became available for research in the Archives’ Research Cloud. They consist of records on environmental issues, subject files on Ukraine, and reports of and submissions to the UN Expert Committee on Investigating War Crimes in the former Yugoslavia. While several new collection descriptions were published in our catalog, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s (RFE/RL) Kevin Devlin collection on non-ruling Communist parties, and two biographical and one subject files series from the Western Press Archive, our Archival Catalog was geared with a new search filter on modes of availability and accessing of archival sources to enhance user experience.

Blinken OSA became a partner institution in the Yerusha project, a comprehensive international database linking archival holdings on Jewish life, history, and culture. Ranging from radio broadcasts and audio interviews to Socialist state media and Jewish political samizdat, and including feature films and home movies, the 23 collections from the Archives’s holdings added to the database record Jewish experiences in pre-war Romania, during the Holocaust in Hungary, and in Soviet Bloc countries from the 1950s until the 1990s.

Throughout the year, there were important developments in our fellowship programs and interuniversity cooperations, which attested to the increasing research prominence of the Archives. The Visegrad Scholarship at OSA was significantly upgraded both in number of available researcher positions and allocated resources. New fellowships and grants were also launched, among them the CEU Budapest – OSUN Postdoctoral and Doctoral Fellowships and the Jewish Studies Research Grant in cooperation with the Democracy Institute, or the Revisionism and Falsification, Evidence and Proof for young, promising and established senior scholars, as well as scholars at risk, run jointly by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Democracy Institute, and Blinken OSA.

For the most part of the year, the Archives, due to a comprehensive renovation of the heating-cooling system in its Goldberger House, was based in CEU’s Budapest buildings and operated its Research Room in the CEU Library, which holds the largest English-language humanities and social sciences collection, comprising 400,000 titles, 61,000 online journals, and a set of important databases. Taking advantage of our presence there, we cooperated with colleagues from other CEU units and organized guided tours through the buildings on Nádor Street on the Night of Museums, introducing visitors to the history of this unique university and explaining to them why those fantastic buildings, spanning roughly 150 years of history of the city, are now largely unused.

The Archives was also actively present on the Vienna Campus of the University for orientation sessions, class presentations, and teaching a variety of courses (see the related chapter in this report), while offered weekly opportunities for students to consult with staff members on archival and research questions. Blinken OSA made its presence visible and tangible also by the means of a series of mini exhibits consisting of 200 images from its collections, including replicas of samizdat and forensic materials, film posters, and photos on the operation of RFE/RL, arranged in thematic clusters on different corridors and social areas of the Quellenstrasse Building.

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 beginning of 2022 was still marked with the lingering presence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was also an influential element when devising our public programs.

Records Uncovered 2.0

The first major undertaking was a continuation and extension of an earlier program that had been realized in an online format due to the raging pandemic of the previous year. On January 18, 2022, the exhibition Records Uncovered 2.0, organized by Blinken OSA and Háttér Archive and Library, opened at the Archives’s Galeria Centralis, presenting LGBTQI+ Histories of Central and Southeastern Europe from the post-WWII period to the early 2000s. Records Uncovered 2.0 built on our online Records Uncovered exhibition, launched in February 2021, expanding it in several respects. The exhibition presented the divergences and commonalities among LGBTQI+ movements in Central and Southeastern Europe in the second half of the last century. It used legal documentation, media reports, private and institutional correspondence, artworks, and ephemera. It was curated by Perica Jovchevski, Central European University / Blinken OSA, and Péter Hanzli, Háttér Archive, and Library.

On February 4, on the 10th anniversary of the first Hungarian LGBT History Month organized by the Háttér Society, the Archives was the host of the opening of the event series, which was launched by the opening of the exhibition Records Uncovered 2.0: LGBTQI+ Histories in Central and Southeastern Europe and the screening of the documentary Out in East Berlin – Lesbians & Gays in the GDR, which was introduced by one of the directors, Jochen Hick. The accompanying events of the exhibition were part of the LGBT History Month program, and they included film screenings and related discussions, round table talks about issues like the beginning of trans activism in Hungary, or Hungarian queer literature in the 1990s, and 2000s. The programs were organized in cooperation with various LGBTQI+ associations in Hungary and the Háttér Archive and Library.

Parrhesia – Fearless Speech

Marking the centenary of the birth of nuclear physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, the 50th anniversary of the founding of Index of Censorship, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of Beszélő, in collaboration with the alternative University of Theater and Film (Freeszfe), Blinken OSA decided to commemorate, recall, and raise awareness of the importance of fearless speech in a series of events.

In a country being in a chokehold of “illiberalism,” individual bravery and integrity are highly valued but rare gems. The exhibition titled Fearless opened on March 16, 2022. As described by the curator, István Rév, Director of Blinken OSA, “The exhibition took inspiration from 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.” The exhibition was opened by two prominent figures, Elena Zhemkova, Executive Director of International Memorial (the organization was liquidated in the Russian Federation on 28.02.2022), and Miklós Gáspár Tamás, philosopher, who passed away recently.

The program series kicked off in October 2021 with an open seminar on parrhesia, a section on parrhesia at the Verzió Film Festival, including a roundtable on the relationship between Independent Media and NGOs in November, a call titled Antigone Project for Freeszfe students to create a theater performance on the theme of parrhesia, and a literary call in November titled My Story of Cowardice, in partnership with Litera. The open call resulted in 284 short story submissions, making it one of the most successful such initiative in Litera’s history. The winning entries were published on Facebook and the Litera Award ceremony took place together with the opening of the Fearless exhibition. With Blinken OSA’s support, Litera has also produced a podcast series on fearlessness, and an online game.

The opening of the exhibition in March 2022 marked the beginning of a rich program series relating to the theme of parrhesia, or fearless speech. The programs included the staging of the two theater plays that were selected as the winners of OSA’s Antigone Project call. The performances were free events that took place at the Archives, with full house. In the framework of the program series, Blinken OSA rescreened five films from the Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival's Parrhesia section, and Miklós Jancsó’s classic, Electra, my Love, followed by a panel discussion tracing fearlessness in the films of the era and in Jancsó’s other works. Further discussions also took place in the framework of the Borderless Knowledge event series, organized in partnership with CEU’s Community Engagement Office, and explored the role and (legal) limits of free speech.

Next to the Fearless exhibition, OSA has also offered space (on its first floor) to a photo exhibition, Within the Blocade by Máté Fuchs. The photos were taken during the 2020 occupation of the University of Theatre and Film Arts by its students. The exhibition was accompanied by an interactive game The Message, designed by Freeszfe students. With Blinken OSA’s support, Klaudia Gardenö, also from Freeszfe, realized a complex, hybrid walking tour through the city. The Ambivalent Hungarian Freedom walk invited participants to visit symbolic places and listen to symbolic sounds of freedom.

For 11 April, the Day of Hungarian Poetry, the Archives partnered with the feat. creative studio, actors and filmmakers from Freeszfe, and writer Péter Závada, to realize the fearless poems project. Six Hungarian poems centered on fearlessness were selected and recited through 12 short videos released, aiming to draw attention to parrhesia through and in poetry.

Night of the Museums

In May, the Archives relocated temporarily to the campus of the CEU due to reconstruction works in the Goldberger House. The move posed a new challenge when designing our plans for the famed Night of the Museums program. Blinken OSA has been participating in the Night of Museums program since 2009, but this was the first time that visitors were invited to the CEU Nádor Street complex. The focus of this year’s program was on the exiled university and its fascinating and troubled history in Budapest. A small chamber exhibition was organized about the history of the building complex and the university. There was a film screening (the documentary Free University, directed by CEU students) and guided tours given by our staff on the campus.

Csalog25

As the construction only finished in December, we designed our next program series for the opportunities the CEU Campus offered.

On the 25th anniversary of Zsolt Csalog’s death, a writer, sociologist, sociographer, and member of the democratic opposition, the Roma Parliament – Roma Civil Rights Movement and Blinken OSA joined his family to honor his work and legacy with a series of events entitled Csalog25.

From October 11 to 14, 2022, theater, documentary film, contemporary literature, music, and collective “Csalog-relay” programs explored Csalog’s life and work. Performers and guests included pianist Gábor Csalog, actors Andrea Fullajtár and Balázs Galkó, documentary filmmaker Juci Csík, civil rights activist Aladár Horváth, sociologist Gábor Havas, writer Márton Soltész, documentary filmmaker István Jávor, and many others.

As part of Csalog25, the Világháló-Irodalom Alapítvány, Litera literary portal, and Blinken OSA launched a contemporary literature competition entitled DOKU’22.

Teaching and education traditionally constitute one of the four fundamental pillars of Blinken OSA’s activity: archives, research, education, and cultural projects. Academic years have a different logic than that of the calendar years: the 2022 calendar year, therefore, included the Winter and spring terms of AY 2021–2022 and the fall term of AY 2022–2023. Several colleagues at Blinken OSA are in faculty position and traditionally teach courses at various departments and programs of CEU, or contribute to the courses of other professors, and this was our practice in 2022, too.

History in the Public Sphere

The teaching activity involving the most Blinken OSA colleagues and a whole range of Blinken OSA’s infrastructure, as well as a set of core theoretical and practical problems Blinken OSA is investigating, was incontestably the internship of the History in the Public Sphere (HIPS) program. HIPS is a two-year master's program offering an Erasmus Mundus joint master’s degree, that focuses on the ways the past is represented, contested, and negotiated in the public sphere, from the early Modern period to the present, in a comparative and transnational way. Students spend a semester at each of the four participating educational institutions, the CEU, the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. During their stay at CEU, students spend a five-week mandatory internship at Blinken OSA in Budapest.

In January 2022, Blinken OSA offered this internship for the second time. Under the professional leadership of István Rév and Ioana Macrea-Toma, students were offered lectures, practical workshops, and guided tours in Budapest, with the participation of our colleagues Zsuzsa Zádori, András Mink, Oksana Sarkisova, Anastasia Felcher, Judit Hegedüs, Katalin Székely, Darius Krolikowski, and Iván Székely, as well as guest lecturers including Thomas Cauvin, professor of Public History at the University of Luxembourg. The tours included a visit to the State Security Archive, guided by Géza Vörös, Head of the Archival Department, and a visit to the Jewish Museum and to the Dohány Street Synagogue, guided by art historian Zsuzsanna Toronyi and film director Péter Forgács. Students had to conceptualize and materialize, at least at a proof-of-concept level, their individual projects during the internship.

The program is in fact a complex course having a yearly theme and a coherent and compact sequence of activities designed to train and allow the students to achieve a “public history” project in the form of a video essay, podcast, or e-magazine. Lectures and seminars are first offered to familiarize the students with the theoretical and historical issues related to the overall topic, then guided tours, archival workshops, and visits to museums and archives ensure an empirical, case-study-based learning experience of the same topic. The hands-on sessions also build skills and provide socialization with professionals in the field, offering an opening for future employment. Media training sessions and diverse mentoring activities (academic consultations, support for pitching, and archival research consultancy) are meant to help students create, review, and finalize their projects in record time.

In 2022, the theme of the program was Fearless Speech and its Fate in the Archives, and was connected to the Blinken OSA exhibition dedicated to fearless speech, which sought to address the conditions and truth content of speaking truth to power. The students had thus the opportunity to act as public historians and to produce video or audio projects for the exhibit (which opened on March 16th, 2022), while considering issues related to validity and veracity of archival materials.

To finalize their projects, students were offered theoretical lectures about the problematics of truth-telling, historical presentations about the cultures of dissent in Central and Eastern Europe and their fate in the archive, guided immersive experience in the Blinken OSA archival collections related to the Cold War and its aftermath, to see their archival logic, understand their context, and analyze their content. Hands-on archival research work helped future public historians to further understand the logic and epistemic assumptions of Cold War data collections and to translate issues having a Central and Eastern European relevance to larger global frameworks. The students were therefore able to understand archives not just as sources, but as wholesale historical documentary projects, necessitating archival care and constant re-contextualization.

Archives, Evidence and Human Rights

Blinken OSA’s oldest, continuously developing, and renewing course is the three-credit MA course Archives, Evidence and Human Rights (AEHR), hosted by the Department of Legal Studies, and cross-listed with the Department of History. The course is taught by a team of Blinken OSA experts: Iván Székely (social informatist, course leader), András Mink (historian), and Csaba Szilágyi (human rights archivist). The aim of the cross-listing between the departments is to attract students with different backgrounds, who work on topics related to recorded memory, historical analysis, and representations of oppressive regimes, as well as retroactive justice.

Using Blinken OSA as a model, the course aims at bringing the structure, database, catalogs, and documents of a contemporary archive closer to the students and at giving specific and practical examples on how to trace and research archival material, as well as evaluate the findings. During the classes, workshops, consultations, and their individual research work in Blinken OSA’s holdings, students are expected to explore the possibilities and limitations of using textual, audiovisual, cartographic, and electronic archival documents as evidence in national or international criminal procedures.

The course also aims at guiding students in understanding common archival goals and processes, and different approaches to gathering and organizing information, developing students’ ability to find and use primary sources in their research and thesis writing, orientating students in the area of online search possibilities, especially in finding and using trusted search engines, databases, and online repositories, urging students to reconsider the use of recorded memory in evaluating the moral and legal aspects of justice-making, challenging students to evaluate, critically approach, and innovatively use different kinds of archival documents relating to violations of human rights, as well as strengthening students’ ability to demonstrate an awareness and understanding of documentary evidence in the context of human rights. Completing the course is a prerequisite for taking the Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization.

In 2022, due to the new schedule resulting from CEU’s move to Vienna, as well as to the students’ increased workload, we were teaching two AEHR courses: in the spring term the “jubilee” 20th edition, while in the following fall term the 21st edition. The spring course, for reasons of the departments’ fully packed teaching schedule, consisted of a reduced number of classes only (12 classes), however, this did not affect the course requirements and the expectations regarding the students’ individual research work at Blinken OSA. In the fall, we returned to the 18-class schedule, in which there were both traditional—although interactive—classes, and workshops where students had to perform various tasks on site and present their mid-term presentations.

The physical division posed significant challenges for professors and students alike: classes and workshops were held in Vienna, while the archival materials are stored in Budapest. During the teaching period, the professors were commuting between Budapest and Vienna; while students individually spent a week in Budapest at Blinken OSA to complete their non-obligatory but highly-recommended individual research in the Archives’ holdings and to consult with their respective supervisors. Students, with the active support of their departments, received a small grant to cover the costs of their research trip. In addition, the OSA Research Cloud, in fact, a virtual research room, provided access for the students to those documents that cannot be uploaded to our openly accessible website for copyright or other reasons.

Paper Cadavers? Archival Powers till the Digital Age

This new course taught by Ioana Macrea-Toma was cross-listed with MA in Comparative History (1 year and 2 years) and MA in HIPS, and investigated the genealogies of archives’ powers from their inception as state-building projects to their metamorphosis into counter-sites of opposing authoritarian power and politics. The course analyzed through certain key case studies—ranging from 19th-century archives to the secret police, counterinsurgency, colonial and identity archives—the changing interaction between influential documentary practices, (counter-)state politics, and history writing. So, instead of offering an “evolutionary” history of archives from the paper age to the digital age, the course offered an insight into what made archives important and relevant in the first place, to understand the challenges associated with digital platforms nowadays. In times when “the paper” and “the digital” are still coexisting due to infrastructural, political, and socio-economic disparities, and “the context” of an item is difficult to assess within the flattening ecologies of digital platforms, it is important to also rethink the relationship between physical records and digital ones.

The course took place in Vienna (instead of Budapest) for the first time, so the students were offered a guided tour at the Vienna State Archives (instead of Blinken OSA) after the session on the co-emergence of memory institutions and nation-states. The teacher also organized archival workshops with sampled materials brought from the Cold War-related collections from Blinken OSA.

History in the Visual Mode: Methods and Practices of Documentary Storytelling

Oksana Sarkisova, together with media production educator and filmmaker Jeremy Braverman, Head of the CEU Library’s Media Hub, taught this course for the third time, offered to students of MA in Comparative History (1 year and 2 years), MA in MATILDA, MA in History in the Public Sphere, and the Advanced Certificate Program in Visual Theory and Practice.

The course focused on representations of contested historical events in documentary cinema, combining theoretical and practical approaches. It introduced students to the basics of analyzing and producing moving images that use historical arguments and explore the relationship between memory and public spaces.

The theoretical part of the course surveyed classical and experimental documentary films and addressed mechanisms of constructing historical narratives by visual means. During class discussions, students analyzed the use of first-person testimonies, found footage, and the role of editing and sound design in documentary films as means of storytelling. In the practical component of the course, students learned the basics of camera work and editing and did group exercises to develop their visual skills. The students learned to film interviews, work with archival footage, and shoot observational scenes. Working on practical assignments, students were introduced to the basics of project development and organization, and learn camera basics and basic post-production techniques.

The course aimed to develop analytical, rhetorical, and visual, as well as a range of practical skills, including collaboration and communication skills. The course introduced students to the basics of visual literacy and developed their critical thinking and ability to design interdisciplinary research projects.

History of Film

For more than 20 years of its existence, CEU operated as a graduate university, consequently all courses offered by Blinken OSA were available for MA and Ph.D. students. After having moved to Vienna and being accredited as an Austrian university, CEU introduced new undergraduate programs. Blinken OSA also offered a course, History of Film, taught by Oksana Sarkisova, for second-year students of the programs Culture, Politics and Society, and Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

The course introduced milestone films in the history of cinema from its beginning to the present day, along with the institutional analysis of the film industry development, highlighting selected periods, movements, and national cinematic traditions (France, Britain, Germany, Russia, US, Japan, etc.). The course also included discussions on the historiography of film history, considering the tension between transnational and national frameworks of analysis. It encouraged individual research and taught students the basics of visual analysis.

Upon completion of this course, students have become able to understand the development of film as a technological medium and a visual language across a diverse range of historical periods and cultures; distinguish historical periods, artistic movements, and national contexts; demonstrate an awareness of theoretical approaches to studying cinema; analyze films by interpreting visual and narrative information; engage a range of critical methodologies for the interpretation of historical and contemporary films; conduct independent research; structure a written work towards communicating a lucid and original argument and to present it in an appropriate style, with bibliography and filmography; and to prepare and perform oral presentation(s) that communicates facts and arguments.

From Kádár’s Megaphone to the Yugoslav Wars: Archival Sources, Media Products, and Propaganda

In collaboration with the Department of Media and Communication at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), members of Blinken OSA staff—András Mink, István Rév, Oksana Sarkisova, Csaba Szilágyi, Gábor Tóka, Zsuzsa Zádori, Miklós Zsámboki—designed a new course on the uses of archival materials in the media and taught it for ELTE students in the fall term of the academic year 2022–2023. The course provided both theoretical and practical introduction to the critical and perceptive uses of traditional and digital archival materials by news media, fact-checkers, and propagandists. The course prepared for professional use of sources, and independent archival research, and helped participants to create original media products for a contemporary lay audience about a topic of their choice using archival sources from Blinken OSA. All enrolled students prepared their own individual media project—e.g., a thematic online exhibition, a video report, a podcast, a small series of blog posts—using archival sources from Blinken OSA with appropriate contextualization and critical reflection on the sources.

Guest lectures

Besides designing and teaching their own courses, Blinken OSA staff members also contributed to the courses of other members of the CEU community. Csaba Szilágyi participated in the seminar Socio-Legal Research Methods, led by Tommaso Soave, in the fall term of 2022. This seminar, offered to SJD students, provided an overview of existing methods in legal and social sciences. Departmental and extra-departmental faculty hosted single sessions on the key methodological approaches to a legal doctoral thesis but also more broadly in the field of social sciences, including comparative legal analysis, quantitative methods, interviewing techniques, discourse analysis, and the archival method. The main aim of this course was to alert and sensitize doctoral students to the various methods existing in social sciences and legal scholarship. This allowed them to understand the different ways in which certain research topics can be approached, as well as to think about which method might be the most useful one for their own research.

Blinken OSA also collaborated with the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), a certificate program for junior and senior undergraduate and graduate students from Ukraine, whether residing in Ukraine or in refuge, whose studies have been affected by the war. IUFU was launched by CEU in May 2022. Anastasia Felcher was a mentor in the spring term in the Culture/Heritage track, for a group of MA/Ph.D. students. Anastasia was an IUFU mentor in the fall term, too, in the Heritage-Based Post-War Urban Reconstruction in Ukraine track, for an MA/Ph.D. group of students. In the fall term of 2022, István Rév and Oksana Sarkisova were guest lecturers within the History track and Culture/Heritage track.

In spring 2022, Csaba Szilágyi was invited to the University of Amsterdam—where he is conducting his doctoral research—to give an online guest lecture in the course Archives and Legal Activism, an MA course in Archival Studies, taught by Prof. Charles Jeurgens. The title of his lecture was Taming the Ghosts: Uncovering “Tacit” Narratives by Rethinking Power Relations in Archives of Violent Past(s). In the fall term, Szilágyi participated in the Course on Divided Societies XXIII: Myths and Media, at the Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia, and gave an online lecture titled Metadata is Political: Creating Alternative Meaning in Records of Violent Past(s).

Ioana Macrea-Toma was an invited guest lecturer for the students of Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences in Palestine University, Department of Communications, Media, and Arts. The title of her lecture provided on November 16, 2022 was "Archives and counter-archives. On the challenges of the historical knowledge."

The Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival took place for the 19th time in November 2022. During the year, we continued to organize various screenings, discussions, and educational programs onsite and online.

In the frame of Re:Verzió, twelve of the films screened at the 18th Verzió were available online from February 14 until March 27. The selection featured the winners of the 18th edition of the festival, and the most popular works that premiered last year. The Re:Verzió films were also shown at live screenings at the Apolló Cinema in Pécs and at the Megálló Community Center in Szeged. In March 2021, following Russia's attack on Ukraine, Verzió joined the fundraising efforts of Docudays UA, our partner festival in Ukraine. We put together a selection of Ukrainian documentaries and made them available on our streaming platform, festival.verzio.org, to collect donations for Ukrainian documentary filmmakers recording the events of the war.

During the spring and summer months, we were working on the preparations for the online film library Verziótheque. We launched Verziótheque in May 2022, with 40 creative documentaries from around the world. The films can be rented by the general audience for a low price, and free of charge for educational purposes. Simultaneously, we worked on further developing our education programs. In May, a one-day workshop was organized for university lecturers teaching or interested in teaching documentary films. Teachers from the Faculty of Humanities at ELTE, from the Faculty of Psychology and Education at ELTE, from the Metropolitan University (METU), from the University of Pécs, and from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics took part in the workshop and exchanged ideas about including documentaries into their methodologies.

The 19th Verzió: Burning Issues

The 19th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival was organized in November 8–20, 2022, its slogan was Burning Issues. Once again, the Verzió team carried out a hybrid event. The theatrical screenings ended on November 16, however, the festival continued until November 20 with films to rent online on festival.verzio.org, available across Hungary—some of them worldwide. It was the first time in the history of the festival that the theatrical screenings lasted nine days, from Tuesday until Wednesday. Simultaneously with the festival in Budapest, screenings and accompanying programs were organized in Pécs, Szeged, Kecskemét, Debrecen, and Szombathely, in cooperation with Szabad Terek, a country-wide network of independent organizations and community spaces The festival had ca. 20,000 viewers and visitors, including the online and offline audience.

The Trafó House of Contemporary Arts has hosted the festival’s Opening Night for several years. The Opening Film was Away (2022, 28 min), by Ruslan Fedotow; a short documentary about two Ukrainian teenagers fleeing the war in Ukraine and arriving in Budapest. Following a welcome speech by Dr. Anett Bősz, Deputy Mayor of Budapest for Human Services, Nóra L. Ritók, educator, and founder of the Real Pearl Foundation, opened the festival.

Ukrainian films were in the spotlight during this edition: the Solidarity UA section consisted of the Postcards from Ukraine section prepared in cooperation with the DocuDays UA Film Festival, and the late Mantas Kvedaravičius' two documentaries about the city of Mariupol were screened as well. Altogether 75 films were screened across 10 competition and thematic categories. The accompanying programs included 40 Q&As and discussions, 9 open industry events, Student Verzió screenings for 1,200 high schoolers, 9 music events, 2 exhibitions, and several online discussions (that are available on Verzió’s YouTube channel).

Verzió also looked into new forms of documentary approaches, works that stretch the boundaries of different cinematic genres. The Vector VR Section exhibited recent international Virtual Reality works that offered new perspectives on various human rights issues. AniDoc, a joint animation documentary film section of Verzió and Primanima, debuted this year. The Young Critics film critic workshop was held for the first time with the participation of six critics under the mentorship of Pamela Cohn (critic, writer, curator, USA) and Zsolt Gyenge (critic, university lecturer, HU). Industry programs were organized in cooperation with MADOKE, the Hungarian Documentary Association, and took place at the Central European University on Nádor Street. The industry program featured nine events over four days, for film professionals, for students, and teachers, as well as for those interested in the practical and theoretical aspects of documentary film education and filmmaking.

Over the four days, renowned experts of documentary cinema from Hungary and abroad discussed higher education opportunities for young talents, the distribution of creative documentaries in Europe, burnout, and the importance of mental health in filmmaking, as well as the cooperation between film festivals and educational institutions. Masterclasses were offered on documentary storytelling, editing as creative development, and feminist filmmaking. On Saturday, eight projects from the 7th Verzió DocLab workshop on editing and story development were presented to potential producers, festival representatives, and funders. Two projects received awards, one award from MADOKE and one from the Biografilm festival in Bologna.

Verzió’s cooperation with universities, called Univerzió, has continued successfully for the fifth year in 2022 with Media and Communication Studies and Film Studies students at the Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE BTK), and Graphic Design students at the Budapest Metropolitan University. Due to the fact that Blinken OSA was closed for reconstruction works, METU students’ alternative film poster exhibition was hosted by the Eötvös10 cultural center. Eötvös10 also hosted the Vektor VR documentary film exhibition, where visitors could watch virtual reality works and immersive documentaries.

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.