Current Projects

Europeana Awareness (2012-2014)

OSA is member of the 48-partner consortium to work on the Europeana Awareness project, which is a Best Practice Network of libraries, archives, and museums, as well as digital developers and innovators led by the Europeana Foundation and funded by the European Union under the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP).

Europeana Awareness is designed to publicize Europeana to users, policy makers, and cultural heritage organizations in every Member State; to promote and encourage its use by a broad public for a variety of purposes (including research, learning, and tourism); to engage users via user generation of content, creation of digital stories and social networking; and to develop new partnerships with four key sectors which are currently underexploited by Europeana: public libraries; local archival groups; broadcast organizations and open culture re-users (programmers, developers, and activists).

OSA will work specifically on the national public media campaign and the end-user engagement to generate new content by organizing collection days for personal archives,  memorabilia and stories related to the regime change in Hungary in 1989.
http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-awareness

Visegrad Scholarship at the Open Society Archives
(2010- )

For a better and deeper understanding of the interdependent recent history of (the center of) Europe, the International Visegrad Fund offers ten research fellowship grants annually at OSA on a competitive basis to support scholars who wish to conduct research in OSA's holdings, and whose current research projects are relevant to the holdings and the given research priorities of the Fund and OSA. The grants of 2000 euro are designed to provide access to the archives for scholars, artists, and journalists, and to cover travel to and from Budapest, a modest subsistence, and accommodation for a maximum research period of two months.

Virtual Filmstrips (2006- )

OSA actively collects digitized educational and propaganda filmstrips from the Cold War period. In Hungary and other Soviet Bloc countries filmstrips were a strictly controlled form of mass media which came to serve both educational and entertainment purposes, paralleling the rise of television in the West. Mass production started in the 1950s when the format was used primarily as a tool for propaganda to be shown at schools, universities, and workplaces. By the 1970s, the form had largely lost its political edge, devolving into “home movie”-style entertainment for children and family projection.
In 1998, OSA brought the culture of filmstrips to the attention of the wider public with an exhibition titled Freeze Frames of Communism, which explored the social, political, and technological circumstances behind the phenomenon. In recent years, OSA has forged ties with local collectors and in 2006 agreed with the Neumann Digital Library to take over the hosting of the Virtual Filmstrip Museum (Virtuális Diafilmmúzeum) online catalogue and digital repository and to ensure long-term access to digitized filmstrip collections. We have recently reintroduced the site with an updated user interface and online cataloguing module and continue to showcase the material through periodic public screenings.
http://www.diafilmmuzeum.hu

Budapest 100 (2011)

OSA and the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre have joined forces in a project to introduce and make publicly accessible several dozens of 100-year-old Budapest buildings on April 9-10, 2011, the 100th day of the year. Using the centennial of OSA's Goldberger House as a pretext, we would like to introduce a new type of celebration in Budapest. Every year buildings that turn 100 years old will have the opportunity to open their doors to the public. The celebration will encourage tenants to get to know each other as they organize a public birthday party to reveal the hidden treasures of their buildings. To date we have listed 140 buildings erected in 1911. Most of them are residential, but several public buildings, such as schools, public health institutions, water towers, and museums are also included.
http://www.budapest100.hu

OSA Leaks: Secret U.S. Diplomatic Documents
(2010- )

OSA has digitized from its library microfilm holdings over 10,000 declassified confidential or secret US State Department documents on the Soviet Union’s relations with the US and other countries in 1955-1959. The material includes telegrams, airgrams, instructions, correspondence, inquiries, memos, situation reports, and translations received from and sent to diplomatic posts abroad. These microfilmed records, the predecessors of today’s Wikileaks cables from the most heated Cold War years, are made public online for the first time on the alternative archival space Parallel Archive through the collaborative work of volunteers. We encourage you to help us disseminate these important historical documents.

20th Anniversary Celebration of the Central European University (2011)

Founded in 1991, the Central European University (CEU) is celebrating its 20th year as an internationally reputed teaching and research institution. OSA, as the repository for historic CEU records, is actively taking part in the 20th Anniversary Celebration. As its first contribution, OSA has prepared and installed an exhibition titled Building CEU, which will run intermittently throughout the year in the CEU Octagon area. The exhibition presents the history of two CEU buildings, the Monument Building (the Festetics Palace) and the Open Society Archives (the Goldberger House) up to and including the future plans for the University Campus. The story of the buildings is depicted through archival photos and architectural plans and includes background information on the architectural history and on the people who planned, built, owned, and lived and worked in these buildings. An online version will be available soon. OSA has also selected from among its holdings and digitized recordings of historically significant public lectures given at the CEU during its first 20 years and made these available on OSA TV. More OSA programs related to the anniversary celebrations will be forthcoming.
http://20.ceu.hu

Heritage of the People's Europe (2010-2013)

OSA is participating as a research partner and content provider in a three-year European Union project entitled the Heritage of the People's Europe (HOPE). HOPE is a Best Practice Network of archives, libraries, and museums that works in close cooperation with the Europeana digital library to improve access to highly significant but scattered digital collections on social history throughout Europe. The project will achieve its goal by: 1) promoting the adoption of standards and best practices; 2) relying on proven open source technologies to create a unified digital content repository service; 3) making metadata and content available through Europeana; 4) enhancing and extending labourhistory.net, the portal of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI); and 5) implementing a full-scale discovery-to-delivery model. The result will be an enabling infrastructure that could never have been achieved by any of the individual partner institutions, big or small, by itself.
HOPE is supported through the European Union Competitiveness and Innovation Framework ICT Policy Support Programme on Digital Libraries.
http://www.peoplesheritage.eu

Voices of the 20th Century Archive (2009- )

The Voices of the 20th Century Archive (Voices) project is led by the Institute of Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with OSA and the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary (NAVA). The purpose of the project is to analyze how different types of interview material can be enhanced through digital technologies and re-used for further research. To this end, the Voices team will work closely with new qualitative research projects and collections as well as with undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate university programs. The final Voices Archive will have three pillars: archiving, research, and public access and will include features such as audio transcription and machine-generated text, refined access, links to methodology resources, and tagging and annotation. The Voices team seeks to collaborate with similar domestic and international initiatives, including other archives, user networks, and partner institutions.
http://www.20szazadhangja.hu/

Digitized Documents and Films of the Hungarian State Security (2007- )

OSA is digitizing records on the structure and modus operandi of the Hungarian political police and other repressive organs of the communist regime. These have been obtained under strict scrutiny by private persons and researchers from various Hungarian archives, particularly from the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security and its predecessors. By uniting the fragmented, scattered and often artificially separated files, we hope to give a full picture of the activities and culture of the former state security organs.
Over the past few years, OSA has digitized and published online several collections of state security documents. Among these are over 200 Educational and Propaganda Films from the film studio of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior presented with three-minute viewable excerpts of each film, as well as over 10,000 pages of the Collection of Directives from the same ministry.

Chachipe (2007- )

Chachipe is an international online photography competition organized by the Roma Initiative Office of the Open Society Institute and OSA under the aegis of the Decade of Roma Inclusion (2005-2015). The competition and its accompanying events, including the main exhibition at the Galeria Centralis, the award ceremony, and a traveling exhibition, are intended to combat visual stereotypes and to authentically portray the Roma as an integral part of their broader national communities. The competition is organized every two years; each competition highlights a novel perspective, targeting a particular group. Selected works from the contest have been put on display across Europe in cities from Brussels to Bucharest and also hosted in several smaller towns in Hungary with the help of the National Association of Local Municipalities (Települési Önkormányzatok Országos Szövetsége, TÖOSZ). The new competition will be announced on May 1, 2011.
http://photo.romadecade.org

Public Digital Archive of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2007- )

The Office of the High Representative (OHR) is an international agency overseeing the implementation of the civilian aspects of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and coordinating the activities of the civilian organizations and agencies operating in Bosnia and Herzegovina. OSA is currently cooperating with OHR on a project to digitize their public archive for preservation and research purposes. The project covers 20,000 documents on the activities of OHR, half of which are currently available at the OHR Archives in Sarajevo, while the rest are being transferred on an ongoing basis to the OHR Archives from the various local and regional offices. Much of this material will be available for archiving and digitizing only after the formal closure of OHR.
http://www.ohr.int/

Samizdat Text Corpora (2006- )

Run within the framework of the International Samizdat [Research] Association (IS[R]A), the Samizdat Text Corpora (STC) aims to bring together the various linguistic and regional bodies of samizdat to create a unified constellation of materials for scholarly research. The project rests on six pillars: Research; Rich Description; Integration; Network Mapping; Multiple Language Access; Community. As envisioned, the final product will comprise a union catalogue and digital repository of samizdat held by IS[R]A institutions and by individuals around the world and include tools for annotating texts and engaging in scholarly discussion with fellow researchers. The first stage, a project entitled Soviet Samizdat Periodicals (1956-1986), was initiated and supported by OSA and Dr. Ann Komaromi, through a grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The objective is to identify, locate, describe, and digitize Soviet samizdat periodicals created between 1956 and 1986 that are held in institutions in Europe and North America and to present our results online for research, education, and public debate.
http://www.samizdatportal.org/index.php/-samizdat-text-corpora/about-stc

Open Document Format Alliance Hungary
(2008- )

OSA was one of the initiators and founding members of the Hungarian Chapter of the Open Document Format Alliance (ODF Alliance). ODF Alliance Hungary promotes the use of the international standard Open Document Format (ODF), encouraging research on its application and developing the Hungarian terminology to support its use. The use of ODF puts an end to dependence on suppliers of office software widely used today and at less expense allows anyone to create documents without license agreements, restrictions, and limitations, at the same time guaranteeing their long-term readability. ODF Alliance Hungary organized the 2010 OpenOffice.org Annual Conference (OOoCon2010) in partnership with the Central European University and Eötvös Loránd University.
http://www.odfalliance.hu

Martus: The Tool for Human Rights Activists (2001- )

Since 2001, OSA has hosted a Martus server, a secure and remote safe to store and preserve information gathered by human rights activists and investigative journalists. The tool developed by Benetech allows users to create a searchable and encrypted database and back this data up remotely to their choice of publicly available servers. The Martus software is used by grassroots organizations, activists, journalists, attorneys, and others around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses. Martus is Greek for "witness".
The Martus software was designed in consultation with human rights groups to be Simple, Secure, and Searchable. The stored records are kept secret by default and are available only to their owners. However, users can choose to make selected records public. The Martus software and documentation are currently available in 8 languages: English, Spanish, Russian, French, Thai, Arabic, Nepalese, and Burmese. The system currently has over 130,000 reports uploaded by users. OSA provides accounts to individuals and organizations upon request. Please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .