Statue of Stalin, torn down during the 1956 October Revolution, and now part of the Memento Park in Budapest. Photo Credit: Teresa Brown
At times, the internet creates the illusion that the whole world is available at our fingertips, the illusion that anyone can become an expert in anything. Other times, its many shortcomings are far more obvious. Take for example a side effect of the current global pandemic: employers and universities are scrambling to move as much of their businesses and services as possible online. The process has been a hectic one, driven by immediate necessity and exposing shortcomings in businesses and services that were not prepared to make the transition. But the general trend towards offering an increasing number of services online is nothing new. One example is historical archives. In an effort to increase accessibility and reduce the wear and tear from physical document handling, many archives have begun uploading some of their material onto their websites. A well-intentioned project, the digitization of archival documents raises questions about the modern role of historical archives.
During the first two and a half months of 2020 I held a position as an intern at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) in Budapest, Hungary. The OSA is an archival repository housing primarily documents relating to the Cold War and international human rights violations. This archive is currently in an ongoing process to digitize their archival holdings. Transferring archival holdings online has the potential to revolutionize research processes: no longer is research limited to those who can afford to travel to the archive, and digitization has the added benefit of reducing the wear and tear that inevitably results from the repeated handling of physical documents.
During my time at the OSA, I used documents from their digital repository, Columbia University Research Project on Hungary Interviews with 1956 Hungarian Refugees, in a presentation for one of my courses. The guidelines for the presentation were open ended – I simply had to choose a topic related to the Cold War and media – and I was interested in examining the role of research conducted by American institutions of Higher Education during the Cold War. The interviews helped me understand the kind of information Columbia was interested in collecting from Hungarian Refugees. I focused on a document containing the questions that were asked in the interviews and evaluated how the phrasing of the questions reveals the type of information the researchers hoped to collect. Now this was in February of 2020 when Budapest, and the OSA, was still very much open to researchers. While I was able to go into the archive and view physical documents, the online format meant that I didn’t have to negotiate my class schedule to fit the OSA’s open hours. In addition, in constructing my presentation, I was able to make extensive use of the high-quality document scans available on their website.
Digitization, however, is not a clear-cut path for the future.
Yes, travel to a city’s archives, in my case Budapest, was an enormous privilege and an opportunity not available to everyone. While I was lucky to have need of one of the few collections that the OSA had digitized, my use of physical archives provided another important aspect to my research, both for research, but also for a broader understanding of the culture and context in which these archives live. A large portion of the documents the OSA houses relate directly to the city of Budapest and its history.
Which brings me to my final point – people. One of the most enriching parts about working at the OSA was the people I met there. I got to know the director, a junior researcher, and one of the senior archivists. I had to conduct my research in English, as I do not speak Hungarian. But, by working with others who do speak Hungarian, I was able to gain insight into some of the material that would have otherwise been inaccessible to me. The OSA’s director is a native of Budapest and lived through the Cold War in Budapest. His insights brought the stories behind the archival documents alive. The junior researcher I was paired with recommended countless books for me to read and helped me navigate the archives. And last, but certainly not least, the senior archivist that I worked with enthusiastically answered all of my questions and went out of his way to get to know me and the projects I was working on.
Now more than ever, digitization efforts like those at the OSA are important in making materials accessible to a broader group of researchers. But as we have realized in so many ways during this pandemic, the opportunities created by virtual resources are sometimes poor substitutes for the in-person version. From creating connections with people to connecting to the city of Budapest simply by sitting in the archives, my research at the OSA provided an opportunity to explore this city’s past that would be difficult to replicate from afar.