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HU OSA 300
Fonds 300: Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (RFE/RL RI)

Date(s) 1949-1994 (predominant 1951-1994)

Extent and medium

Estimated total:
About 2500 linear meters, 414 rolls of 16 mm microfilm, 110 rolls of 35 mm microfilm, 31 posters, 381 still photographs, 257 open reel tapes, 647 videocassettes (on 8 March 2000)
Currently processed:
19066 Archival boxes, 2,383 linear meters
78 Archival card boxes, 25 linear meters
1 Audio cassette, 0.02 linear meters
1 Beta SP, 0.03 linear meters
2 Oversized box (40cm), 0.80 linear meters
237 Rolls of 16mm microfilm in microfilm cabinet, 5 linear meters
270 Rolls of 35mm microfilm in microfilm cabinet, 14 linear meters
20 SDLT I, 0.68 linear meters
268 VHS, 7 linear meters
Total: 2,435 linear meters

Immediate source of acquisition or transfer

The records of the Research Institute are deposited under a 1994 agreement between Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Open Media Research Institute and the Open Society Institute.

Scope and content

The records consist primarily of clippings, abstracts of media reports, and monitoring of television and radio broadcasts. Also included is the record set of publications of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and its predecessors (Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). The records of the Institute for the History of Communism, an independent entity affiliated with the Radios, are also present.

The records are organized by the unit of the Research Institute or its predecessors that created the records. Many series of records continued from the early years of the Radios to the close of the Research Institute, irrespective of the name of the organizational unit that created them. Most important among these are the series of files directly concerned with the countries to which the Radios broadcast; these are found within the records of the Information Resources Department.

The records are primarily textual, but they include videotapes of Russian television broadcasts and small quantities of other audiovisual materials and electronic records.

Especially important are the files of samizdat publications from the Soviet Union and Poland and related information about unofficial activities in the countries of the region.

Note: The records usually do not contain information about the administration of the Research Institute or of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The corporate administrative records and the broadcast tapes and scripts were transferred to the Hoover Institution (http://hoorferl.stanford.edu/ Library and Archives: Radio Free Euroipe/ Radio Liberty Records)

Accruals Not expected

System of arrangement

Conditions governing reproduction

Copyright is owned by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Pursuant to the deposit agreement (see legal status), this material is provided for, and may be copied for, research purposes only. Any other use requires the prior written consent of RFE/RL.

Language/scripts of material

Albanian, Armenian, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Moldavian, Pashto, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian

Related units of description

Note

Periodicals and related materials deposited with the Open Society Archives are described on the Archives' Library site; books deposited with the Open Society Archives are described in the Central European University library catalog.

Date(s) of descriptions

Trudy Huskamp Peterson 16 October 1998; Leszek Pudlowski 15 July 2000; revised by Pavol Šalamon, 18 December 2002
Online version updated 21 January 2010
© 1995-2005 Open Society Archives at Central European University