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The Open Society Archives (OSA), situated in the heart of Hungary's capital, Budapest, are the most recent acquisition of the Central European University. The OSA were founded in 1995 by George Soros, the man who also founded the CEU itself. When it first opened, the OSA operated as one section of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, although the original intention was for the archives to be part of the CEU; this original goal was finally achieved in 1998. Although the Archives' administrative history is quite complicated, the nature of the collection is straightforward. The OSA contain the former holdings of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The recording and research programme of the Open Society Archives has three main goals: to acquire, preserve and make available resources in the field of Communism and the Cold War which relate mostly to the former Eastern Bloc; to acquire, preserve and make available material which relate to human rights issues and movements in the twentieth century; and to document the activities of the Soros Foundation Network.
The Archives' holdings are organised according to country; documents relating to different countries are often very similar in nature. The core of the records is a vast collection of clippings from daily, weekly and other types of periodicals. Radio station staff gathered such material in order to document all aspects of the lives of the former communist countries. According to this principle, material can be accessed via a subject list which includes such titles as `Communist Party', `Foreign Relations', 'Industry' and 'Culture'. Research...