In April 2011, I had only vague ideas about the nature of the administration of this unique workplace which is involved in diverse cultural and intellectual activities. Looking back I realize how much I have learnt about the operation of our Administrative Unit, which consists of a Head of Administration, a Research Center Coordinator, an Admin Assistant and Receptionists. We operate invisibly in the background, while we have to be at hand for colleagues all through the workday.

We are required to work in close cooperation with the Budget and Finance Office and the Human Resource Office in Central European University ensuring transparency of budgetary and employment procedures at Blinken OSA. Among the innumerable tasks of the Admin Unit, I am involved in purchases ranging from coffee supplies to valuable assets for exhibition installations. I am also responsible for preparing the payroll of our staff.

By now OSA’s staff has increased to almost 40 people including employees with temporary contracts. The Administration Unit has to provide for different professional needs for everyone. The smooth organization of various events/ meetings/professional travel can sometimes be challenging, so admin members rely heavily on each other’s work. The members of the Administration Unit are all in contact with Blinken OSA's business/professional partners, and with the members of the community of the Archives in various ways.

Guests and visitors at the Archives and at Galeria Centralis often make positive and even complimentary comments about Blinken OSA’s activities as they stop by the reception desk. In my view, this is the best part of this profession.

Last year OSA became a dog-friendly workplace, which means that dog fans and would-be dog fans have a chance to ease tensions with the help of a playful and energetic four-legged companion.

Another source of acquisitions was the huge holdings OSI Budapest left behind after their move to Berlin: altogether 36 pallets, some 7.5 tons of publications meant for shredding and recycling. The Archives decided to take over the books, sort them out, and offer as many of them as possible as a donation. By the end of the year the selection process was completed. As a result, only 33 % of the OSI Budapest holdings will be recycled, while 67 % of the publications were systematically repacked, ready for distribution. Their inventory and donation will be continued and finished in 2019.

Our efforts were also concentrated on cataloging our backlog: our samizdat and émigré book collection as well as other special publications. A major achievement in 2018 was our contribution to the success of the Suicide – Hungary 1956-1986 exhibition with research based on our rich library collection.

Later on, it was confirmed that Blinken OSA is one of the research facilities that will remain in Budapest while CEU has been moving to Vienna. None of this had much impact in terms of reducing the role of the Archives in the academic community in Hungary.

The statistics, if compared with those of past years, illustrate stable numbers corresponding to those of the previous year. The pressure on CEU did not lead to the drastic changes in trends and figures that one might have anticipated. In general, our numbers are in line with previous years’ - stable figures and good performance. The trend of constant growth of new researchers which stated 2015 continued in 2018 and the number of visitors was better in 2018 than in 2016, or in 2017. Overall, the total number of visits has fallen slightly since 2014. The composition of visitors varies and we can see that the highest number (77) were students from CEU, followed by foreign students (55), while the number of Hungarian students is in decline (20). Concerning new archival requests, the year 2018 showed the second best figures (over 1,000) in 5 years, which is slightly at odds with the number of documents, where a notable decline has been observed. This can be explained by the fact that research strategies change as Visegrad scholarship-holders tend to physically process materials in the research room and not to take digital images. In other words, we have fewer and fewer short research visits, which produce a large number of requests but also a substantial quantity of digital images.

The figures in Table 1 illustrate that since 2015 OSA witnessed a slight growth in the number of new researchers. The majority of students who visited OSA during the pre-session week at the beginning of September came back for their research, a different tendency to that of previous years when the registration was “highly recommended”. The rate of 6.4 visitors per day was maintained in 2016 and 2017 but fell slightly to 6.3 in 2018. The slight decline in the total number of visitors, which has also fallen since 2015 (1419 visits) continued in 2017 (1361 visits) and in 2018 (1344 visits). This trend has already been explained in previous Annual Reports as the result of several factors, such as the abundance of digital content available online, a change in discourse in academia most notably at CEU. The trend from previous years, i.e. slightly fewer visitors spending longer research sessions, continued (from 03:57 in 2016 to 04:07 in 2017, and finally to 05:05 in 2018 per researcher.)

The renewed outreach efforts to attract CEU faculty have been conducted by inviting a number of CEU faculty from several departments important for OSA; not all the professors responded or accepted our invitation to visit us. We can only hope that more of them will visit OSA’s website and become familiar with our collections. However, foreign faculty acknowledge the importance and the value of OSA and their number continues to be around 20 each year.

At the same time, successful contact was made with the ELTE Institute of Germanistic Studies: professors brought their students to visit OSA several times and plan to keep bringing their students in the future as well.

The number of CEU students has continued to rise since 2016 although a 5 year period shows a considerable fluctuation, with growth in one year and then a sudden decline in another. More striking is the constant decrease in the number of foreign faculty over a period of 5 years as well as a somewhat slighter decrease of foreign students. One possible explanation could be the lack of funds and research grants for research abroad. The “Hungarian professionals” category also experienced a significant drop in comparison to the relatively “good years” 2016 and 2017 (around 45 professionals): this number fell to 35 in 2018.

As in previous, in 2018 Visegrad grantees played an important part in our statistics, alongside other students from partner Institutions and Universities (George Mason University, West Point Military Academy, Corvinus University etc.). They all are included in the “Students from Abroad” Category.

The number of Requests per day in 2018 fell slightly from 5.3 in 2017 to 5.0 in 2018. Lower figures have been also noted in document number and production of digital images.

The most frequently requested collections were those relating to the Cold War and RFE/RL in particular. About 70 percent of all requested archival boxes come from this research area. They were followed by Human Rights collections (c. 20 percent) such as audio – visual tapes from the International Monitor Institute, Records of the International Human Rights Law Institute Relating to the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia and Records of the Physicians for Human Rights’ Bosnian Project. The third research area involves collections of the Central European University or/and history of the Open Society Foundation in the region, but not to such an extent as in previous years.

To sum up, one notices that unfavorable external events did not negatively affect the activities of the OSA Reference Services, especially as far as the CEU community is concerned. Visits by foreign students and faculty depend on “non-political” issues such as those already mentioned – finance-related. However, what could be a matter for concern in the near future is the clear and visible decrease in the number of Hungarian students, professionals and university staff. We still do not know what the real reason is but OSA should carefully observe this trend and draw conclusions as to whether the falling numbers represent only an isolated anomaly or steady trend due to other and more complex problems. If the trend continues, OSA should initiate deliberate and complex outreach campaigns in the near future. Thus, there is space for improvements, such as preparing OSA’s Reference Services to respond to the new situation caused by the partial move of CEU to Vienna in 2019. The creation of a modern and integrated Reference and Researcher Data System that would unite OSA’s finding aids and online catalogue with improved patterns of our current Researchers database into a new web based platform is a new and challenging task for us in 2019.

The issue of the continuation of the Visegrad scholarships has not always been OSA’s immediate responsibility or competence, but we believe that the Program will continue to exist and that it contributes a great deal to cultural and intellectual diversity. Currently, the Reference Services are also undertaking initiatives to set up a similar scheme with south-east European countries to counterbalance the possible loss of students from CEU. For this reason 2019/20 will be challenging too.

Teaching

Csaba Szilágyi participated in the Open Learning Initiative University Preparatory Program (OLIve UP) at CEU, offered to refugees and asylum seekers in Hungary, where he co-taught the Documentary and Memory Practices in Archives course together with Anikó Kövecsi in the spring semester of 2018. Csaba was a lecturer at the Srebrenica Summer University, in Sarajevo in July 2018; his presentation was titled “Documents of human pain: (Re)Using Mass atrocity records on Srebrenica”.

In the fall semester of the academic year 2017-18, the 17th time the multidisciplinary course Archives, Evidence and Human Rights (AEHR) was taught for the seventh time, by three staff members of Blinken OSA, Iván Székely, Csaba Szilágyi and András Mink. The three-credit course has been traditionally offered to students of the Departments of Law and History; however, students from other programs are also admitted when the number of registered students permits. This year students of sociology and social anthropology also participated in the work, which included classes, workshops, and intensive individual research projects and consultations on the basis of which a final essay had to be prepared by each of the 17 participants, who represented different professional and cultural backgrounds.

In the spring semester the second group of students started on the Archives and Evidentiary Practices Specialization worked out and provided by Blinken OSA. The three parts of this specialization include the AEHR course itself, during which the students learn how to use the archives from the researchers’ point of view; Archival Practice, in the course of which students get acquainted with the professional tasks of the archivists who serve researchers; and the Advanced Coursework during which they obtain deeper knowledge in certain problems of archivistics. In the second and third phases several colleagues from Blinken OSA staff participated as teaching fellows, under the leadership of Csaba Szilágyi. All the four students who took this specialization successfully completed their studies and prepared their written exam by June.

Oksana Sarkisova, together with Jeremy Braverman, were teaching a four-credit filmmaking course for historians and those in related fields, “Historical Narratives and Moving Image”, combining theoretical and practical components. The course was offered to students of history and other humanities and social sciences interested in visual imagery. She was also teaching a course, together with Renata Uitz, offered to students of law, “Human Rights and Documentary Cinema”. This course introduced ten recent thought-provoking, educational, professionally crafted, and visually engaging documentary films from different parts of the world addressing a variety of human rights issues, exploring the variety of means of filmmaking and the political and economic contexts which create conditions for human rights abuses.

Research

Several members of the Blinken OSA community have traditionally been active in research in the areas of the Archives’ activities, and produced publications and conference presentations in 2018, too.

Oksana Sarkisova continued her collaborative research project on Soviet vernacular photography with Dr. Olga Shevchenko. She is currently further extending the framework of research as a comparative study of repurposing archival footage in documentary and fiction film in Eastern Europe, with special emphasis on amateur film and video materials. In 2018, her research findings were published in two collected volumes as articles co-authored with Olga Shevchenko: “The Heroic, the Banal and the Improbable in the Family Memories of the Soviet Past”, in Silke Arnold-de Simine and Joanne Leal (eds.), Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory, Bloomsbury Academic, London, and “The Album as Performance: Notes on the Limits of the Visible”, in Julie Cassiday, Julie Buckler and Boris Wolfson (eds.), Russian Performances: Word, Object, Action, University of Wisconsin Press, 2018.

Csaba Szilágyi’s ongoing research projects include archiving mass atrocity records for transitional justice, archives and people on the move: refugee narratives in historical records. His book chapter “Re-archiving mass atrocity records by involving affected communities in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina” is published in Sandra Ristovska and Monroe Price (eds.), Visual imagery and human rights practice, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 131-152.

András Mink’s research in collecting documents on the history of the great transformation of the political system resulted in the publication of the book Rendszerváltás [Regime-change], published by Osiris, Budapest, in 2018, in which he edited and published the most relevant documentary sources of this period.

Blinken OSA staff members participated in several international conferences and workshops in 2018, too.

Csaba Szilágyi was organizer and participant of the international workshop “After ICTY: Prospects for Reconciliation and Transitional Justice in the Post-Yugoslav Region” and the “Refugee Rights in Records” Symposium, both held in Blinken OSA; at the latter event he delivered a presentation titled “Who Does Not Leave Will Be Killed”: Refugee Narratives in Historical Perspective. At the same event Iván Székely also delivered a presentation titled “Mass Problems and the Search for Individual Solutions. Stakeholders and Interests in Documenting the Refugee Crisis”. Csaba gave presentations at the conferences on “Archives and Human Rights: An Agenda to Strengthen Human Rights” in Buenos Aires, and “Archival Education and Research Institute” at the University of Alabama (“Teaching Archives, Evidence and Human Rights: A Multidisciplinary Approach”); “After ICTY: Regional Cooperation, Accountability, Truth and Justice in the Former Yugoslavia” in Sarajevo (“Archives dealing with the future: managing the heritage of conflict”), and Refugee Rights in Records Symposium” at the University of Zagreb (“Records and People on the Move: An Archival and Education Project”).

Iván Székely delivered a lecture titled “TK 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, or Lessons Learned from an Institution’s Metamorphoses” at the conference “Hungarian Sociology at the Turn of the Century” held at the John Wesley Theological College, Budapest; he also delivered a presentation at the annual conference of the John von Neumann Computer Society in Budapest, “The Master and the AI”, titled “Post-Fact Society: When Even Fake News Become Unreliable”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqyXdJbb0Ak (in Hungarian)

Each of the conferences and workshops, as well as the exhibitions organized by Blinken OSA, involves preparatory research, the results of which were presented at these professional events. One outstanding event of 2018 was the exhibition “Farewell to Spring: Revolutionary Youth Magazines 1968. Nr. 2”, which presented the thriving and hopeful period of student protests, happenings and other events of youth- and counter culture in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, and was opened at the 50th anniversary of the 1968 events.

To enhance the films’ impact, we encourage applicants to organize additional follow up discussions for which they can either call our experienced moderators or use the toolkit we prepared in the spring of 2018. Several screenings took place in 2018 to over 800 students throughout the country. The program provides students with the opportunity to develop film and media literacy skills and better understand the nature of documentary cinema while it increases human rights awareness.

Between February 7 - March 7, 2018 the traditional encore screening series, Re-Verzió, were held in the Blinken OSA Archive. 5 occasions were organized to screen some of the best documentaries from the 14th Verzió Film Festival’s program, including the opening film and award winners. All 5 screenings were well attended: 40-80 people stayed for each session, making it one of the most successful Re-Verzió events of the past 14 years.

On July 4, 2018 Verzió at Blinken OSA Archive organized the Hungarian premiere screening of the US documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. The screening was followed by a discussion with representatives of LGBT activist organizations Transvanilla and Háttér Society. The event was part of the Budapest Pride event series and promoted in the Budapest Pride month program brochure. The discussion focused on the rights of trans people in Hungary: medical, family law, legal recognition of transgender people etc. Approximately 60 people attended the event.

A call for submissions to the 15th Verzió Film Festival was circulated between February and June 2018. Ca. 600 films were submitted to Verzió. The preselection committee previewed the films from June to September and selected 59 films from 35 countries for the program.

15th Verzió International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival was held on November 6-11, 2018 in Budapest, and on November 15-25, 2018 in Pécs, Kecskemét and Szeged. The festival showcased a selection of powerful creative documentaries and held 135 screenings and further events at a total of 10 venues throughout the country. All films at the festival were screened with English subtitles and most films were translated into Hungarian as well. The program comprised several sections: International Competition, Student & Debut Competition, Hungarian Panorama, Labour: Our Life in cooperation with the International Labour Organization of the UN – to discover the various aspects of work, Our Earth: Breaking Limits reporting on the status of our planet, Shapes of Memory discovering the powerful impact of historical events on our present, an Hommage section presenting the last films of two great directors, Claude Lanzmann and Michael Glawogger, and a block of shorts from the Indigenous communities in Quebec: Wapikoni’s Friends. Films about refugees in Europe and beyond were screened in collaboration with the UNHCR Central Europe.

Discussing films at Verzió has been just as important as watching them. Verzió 15 hosted 45 filmmaking guests from 20 countries who participated in 43 Q&As with the audience and 13 panel discussions with local experts. Round tables involved film professionals, human rights experts, and representatives of our international partners (UNHCR, ILO); Q&As were moderated by media experts, NGO representatives, film students and scholars. Various industry programs took place as well in order to increase the circulation of creative ideas within the doc film community: three Doc-Pro panel discussions took place debating the ethical dilemmas of documentary filmmaking, co-production possibilities across Europe, and new models for bringing documentary films to the public. A 4-day intensive filmmaking workshop, DocLab, was organized with the participation of 7 projects in development under the mentorship of experienced European film professionals, award-winning US filmmaker Bill Morrison gave a masterclass on his work with found footage, and Canadian producer Manon Barbeau held a workshop inspired by the community cinema project, Wapikoni Mobil.

Verzió continued its educational programs for high-school students as well: Student Verzió offered 6 films to young people aged 14-18. The festival hosted over 1000 high school students at the free morning screenings followed by moderated discussions, and for the first time organized a day-long program, Youth Verzió, with the participation of 6 NGOs and UNICEF Hungary, engaging over 80 kids from disadvantaged backgrounds from outside Budapest with media and human rights awareness workshops. Another novel feature of the festival was Uni-Verzió, a collaboration with 4 universities which involved over 100 students from film studies, graphic design, art management and media and communication studies. Students took part in the festival preparations and contributed with film reviews to the Verzió Blog. A graphic design MA class designed alternative posters for the festival films which were then exhibited at the Empathy café, the charity café of The Red Cross in Hungary, which also served as a meeting point for festival guests and visitors.

The Verzió team and "film guardians" have reached out to dozens of civil organizations and activists, involving them in the festival events and collaborating on joint communications campaigns for individual films. Music events took place every night in Toldi Cinema, the festival center, with free entry provided to the concerts with cinema tickets valid to the last film screening of the day as an incentive for young people. A special program for families took place on Sunday morning when we screened a movie about a kids’ choir in the slums of India, which was followed by an audience sing-along with a local choir.

A range of awards were presented, in 2018 for the first time extended with two audience awards to the best-rated Hungarian (A Woman Captured by Bernadett Tuza-Ritter) and international film (The Time of Forests by Francois-Xavier Drouet); The International Jury awarded the Best Student Film (The Island by Adam Weingrod) and a Student Jury, consisting of university students, awarded the Best Human Rights Film (Srbenka by Nebojsa Sljepcevic). A Kid’s Jury was organized for the first time (made up of high-school students) who selected their favorite film from the Student Verzió section: Granny Project by Bálint Révész.

We have added three films from the program to School Verzió, therefore schools can now choose from ten creative documentaries, secured until the end of 2020.

Altogether, Verzió 15 welcomed ca. 10,000 attendees at its programs throughout the country, demonstrating 20% increase in visitor numbers compared to the previous year. This success could be achieved thanks to the great efforts of the staff members and new strategies in audience and program development as well as a significant grant from the Creative Europe Media program of the European Union that was received for the first time by the nonprofit Verzio Film Foundation as the only film festival in Hungary in 2018. The turnout, along with participants’ feedback, demonstrates the great potential that this human rights documentary film festival holds as a community-building initiative and an educational resource. It brings audiences of all ages and walks of life together to watch and debate creative documentary films that can inspire social change.

It was shared with hundreds of teachers throughout the country, along with invitations to participate in the free program. To enhance the films’ impact, we encourage applicants to organize additional follow up discussions for which they can either call our experienced moderators or use the toolkit we prepared in the spring of 2018. 25 screenings took place in 2018 to over 800 students throughout the country. The program provides students with the opportunity to develop film and media literacy skills and better understand the nature of documentary cinema while it increases human rights awareness. We have added three films from the program to School Verzió; therefore schools can now choose from ten creative documentaries, secured until the end of 2020.

Between February 7 and March 7, 2018 the traditional encore screening series, Re-Verzió, were held in the Blinken OSA Archive. 5 occasions were organized to screen some of the best documentaries from the 14th Verzió Film Festival’s program, including the opening film and award winners. All 5 screenings were well attended, 40-80 people stayed for each session, making it one of the most successful Re-Verzió events of the past 14 years.

On July 4, 2018 Verzió at Blinken OSA Archive organized the Hungarian premiere screening of the US documentary, The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. The screening was followed by a discussion with representatives of LGBT activist organizations Transvanilla and Háttér Society. The event was part of the Budapest Pride event series and promoted in the Budapest Pride month program brochure. The discussion focused on the rights of trans people in Hungary: medical care, family law, and legal recognition of transgender people.

Over the last few years, in cooperation with the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, the Blinken Open Society Archives has been processing the Free Europe Committee/Radio Free Europe (FEC/RFE) Encrypted Telex Communication Collection, a very important source for the history of the Cold War. Founded in 1949, one of the FEC’s main projects was creating Radio Free Europe, which broadcasted radio programs to the Eastern bloc. The FEC New York and RFE Munich headquarters sent daily encrypted telex messages to each other, amounting to several hundred per month. The messages covered everything from topics such as RFE employee vacation days, to ten-page reports on agricultural situations in the Eastern bloc.

In 2018, we took a very important step for the collection and launched a new website. While we are still working on various aspects of the website for users, the current goal is to finish processing each message. The processing focuses on metadata, but we have also been creating additional tools for researchers, such as a list of acronyms and people, as well as a textual key. Currently, there are three OSA interns processing the collection: Jack Atmore, Pearl Silverman, and Mihai Savuu, with Robert Parnica as their supervisor. We have about 14,000 messages left to process in 2019, out of a total of 22,000 messages left to publish on the website. There are currently 34,541 messages available to researchers on the website, covering the years from 1960 to 1973. There are multiple ways to filter a search in order to find a specific message: by keywords, year, author, contributor, or location. The website also provides guidance to researchers on how to search and read the messages, explaining the file viewer and the structure of a telex message respectively. Additionally, historical timelines of both the processing of the FEC collection and of RFE’s organization history are available, which can provide contextualization for researchers. For further context, researchers can use the data visualization tools or export the available raw data for their own visualization. We hope that this website provides the public with new tools for discovering and researching the history of the Free Europe Committee and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty..