The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) organized and hosted an international, cross-disciplinary conference and workshop on May 13-14, 2016.
The Open Society Archives (OSA) is the official repository for the Central European University and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) and over the past several years, while we have been collecting records for the CEU and OSF organizational archives, OSA has been selecting the digital copies of any OSF Roma-related program materials, including grant and some scholarship files. OSA has begun an exciting, experimental information processing and retrieval project that we are calling the Roma Digital Repository Project (RDRP).
Blinken OSA colleagues meet Pál Ferenczi, who spent a year in Mauthausen with Leó Goldberger, former owner of the Goldberger House, our archives’ home at Arany János Street 32. Text by Gwen Jones, Judit Izinger and Zsuzsa Zádori.
OSA is honored to announce public access to the first portion of the Free Europe Committee (FEC) compilation of Cold War digital records. These 8,100 digital files were first available on November 3, 2015, for researchers only and covered the period of FEC activities from 1960-1964. OSA has only uploaded, this first chunk of a total database of 35,000 encrypted messages taking up 22 microfilm reels, ranging from 1960-1970.
We closed down our first thematic public program on Surveillance only a few days ago. The event series was opened with the exhibition Watching You, Watching Me in early October 2015. It was curated by our OSF NY colleague, namely Yukiko Yamagata to raise a series of recent issues in our post-panoptical societies through the gaze of the artist-photographer.
November 4th, at the third event of the Secret Police Film Festival, organized by my Blinken Open Society Archives colleague, Zsuzsa Zádori, we watched 4 incredibly interesting films about the political and social situation in Poland in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. The first three were primarily about surveillance techniques used by the Polish secret police. In the first film, footage of the U.S.
Archiving and records management (ARM) professionals are often considered to preserve the past rather than shape the future. The 3rd International Council on Archives (ICA) named, Archives: Evidence, Security and Civil Rights , revealed that ARM professionals are equally responsible for designing current policies and future change as they are for preserving the memories.
Public space, where culture, politics and art can happen, all together.
Cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was assigned to do a study of the Japanese character in June 1944 which happened to be the same moment of the US-led offensive against Japan.  Despite the fact that at that time Japan was considered to be the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle, a military or economic analysis would not have been enough. At stake was the understanding of Japanese habits of thought and emotions .