Blinken OSA Annual Report 2020

Empty Research Room by Edit Blaumann

Blinken OSA is happy to announce that the 2020 Annual Report has been released in digital format. The Annual Report gives an in-depth view of the diverse activities of the Archives.

Year 2020 was marked by a tragic worldwide pandemic that fundamentally changed the way the Archives could operate. Contrary to the many challenges, significant archival processing work was done, the teaching activities of our colleagues continued online, exhibitions were opened both on-site and online, new acquisitions arrived, films were screened, new curated collections became available, school programs were reorganized online, and colleagues pursued their academic activities in the form of online conferences, workshops, and publications.

István Rév, the Director of Blinken OSA writes of 2020:

“’A Dreadful Course of Calamities’ befell us at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives last year. Some of them were foreseen and expected:

following the eviction of CEU from Hungary, the move of the University from Budapest to Vienna; the difficulties of providing access to archival materials to the students and faculty of CEU; the intensification of the government’s war on culture, research, education, and civility; the government’s growing impatience with the past, and the efforts to rewrite wholesale the history of both the country and Europe.

Some of the calamities, however, were (for most of us) unexpected: the fast-emerging indifference, both local and global, to historical facts; and obviously the plague, the pandemic that paralyzed the globe.”