The Audio-Visual Unit in 2017
Zsuzsa Zádori
The Audio-Visual Unit in 2017

The Audio-Visual Unit in 2017: Processing, preserving and publishing moving image and sound collections at OSA

Processing news

Three major video and sound collections catalogued and published on-line

Russian Service Audio Archives of RFE/RL - - Now Online. Browse 26 K Russian radio broadcast files for free

OSA presented an online, fully searchable database of audio programs produced by RFE/RL Russian Service during the last 50 years. As a result of the cooperation between OSA, RFE/RL and the Hoover Institution Library & Archives this vast cultural heritage is now available for free without any restrictions.

OSA systematized, preserved and processed this unique audio collection from the Cold War era. The collection includes more than 26,000 audio clips broadcast into the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation by Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) from 1953 (the year the service was established in Munich, West Germany) to 1995 (when RFE/RL moved from Munich to Prague, Czech Republic).

Highlights of the radio programs include news and political programs about the U.S.S.R. and the world as reported by distinguished émigré journalists, writers and historians; on-air readings of banned literary works and poetry recitals; and unique radio plays authored by such luminaries of Russian letters as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Viktor Nekrasov, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Voinovich, Alexander Ginzburg, and Eugenia Ginzburg.
The archive also includes Radio Svoboda’s collection of samizdat, or clandestinely published materials which provided news about trials, imprisonments, forced labor camps and forbidden expressions of life behind the Iron Curtain; and talk shows that connected Soviet audiences with Russian exile culture.

With the publication of over ten thousand hours of Russian language broadcast in a bilingual English and Russian catalog OSA wishes to further facilitate free and critical thinking, and to encourage research into Soviet era culture and politics.
Publishing the Radio Free Europe –Radio Liberty Russian language broadcast archive would have been impossible without the dedicated work of RFE/RL in Prague, especially of Ivan Tolstoy and Olga Shirokova. OSA would also like to thank Irina Lagunina and Oleg Shariy for their continuous support.
 

Soviet propaganda film collection now online

After the ‘House of Soviet Science and Culture’  in Budapest was closed down following the change of regimes in 1990, this rare collection of films became ownerless. Thanks to the efforts of Anna Geréb, film historian of Russian and Soviet cinema, this rich sample of propaganda and educational films was spared from destruction.  Blinken OSA has cleaned the films, and digitized them to be used for education and research.
The video collection contains 109 films on popular science, industry, agriculture, the army, nature, music, it includes youth and sport films and some newsreels. The majority of these items were produced in the Soviet Union (98 titles); others were made in Hungary (5), Romania (3), Belgium (1), Bulgaria (1) and Czechoslovakia (1). They were shot on 16mm celluloid film, and released between 1944 and 1987, predominantly in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the films are dubbed into Hungarian (87). The original 16 mm celluloid film prints were stored and occasionally screened at the ‘House of Soviet Science and Culture’.

These films cover a wide range of topics and were made not merely to educate the audience about their subject matter, which ranged from the construction of the Baikal-Amur railway line and metallurgy to child care, cosmology, the history of WWII, nuclear energy, hydro plant construction, just to name but a few themes. They were supposed to win the hearts and minds of viewers  for communist ideology and for the Soviet cause. The films tell the Soviet version of both history & science, portraying the Soviet Union and its satellite countries as lands of incomparable wealth, development and happiness.

 Published Samizdat Sound Recordings, Radio Liberty (Radio Svoboda) on-line for the first time

The collection contains 58 unique audio files that were produced and/or broadcast by RFE/RL’s Russian Service. These sound recordings reveal what life was like for political prisoners in forced labor camps; for dissidents in psychiatric hospitals; for Catholics or Jews wishing to practice their faith. The material was cleaned and digitized at Blinken OSA. For the first time OSA makes this unique Cold War history collection available online.

Background:

In 1995, as Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) was shutting down in Munich, the Archives of RFE/RL’s Research Institute were shipped to the newly established Open Society Archives (OSA) in Budapest. The shipment included over 6,000 shelf-meters of material: over 40,000 books; East Europe’s largest periodical collection; thousands of boxes and binders with paper documents; filing cabinets with manuscripts and records of RFE/RL; thousands of video cassettes and approximately 150 open-reel audio tapes with the legacy of the Soviet Samizdat Unit at RFE/RL.

The Soviet samizdat sound collection consists of approximately 100 audio recordings produced and preserved at the Samizdat Unit of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty in Munich, West Germany. The initial recordings consist of published and unpublished samizdat, created between 1970 and 1991.

The Published Samizdat part (58 recordings), nearly 18 hours of sound recordings, was created between 1970 and 1989. These are the audio master files of the Samizdat Archive (‘Archiv Samizdata’). They include recorded telephone conversations between RFE/RL staff in Europe and the US, and opposition members in the USSR. Some of the original tapes, however, were smuggled out of the Soviet Union and archived by RFE/RL. These recordings shed light on how the Samizdat Unit operated and how Western human rights activists gathered information from behind the Iron Curtain.

Digitization and processing of 900 hours of Hungarian regime change videos

 Archiving the Hungarian regime change videos has been a priority for Blinken OSA for three years. In 2017 another 900 hours of raw, unedited archival video footage recorded by the Black Box Foundation has been processed: they were digitized for long term preservation, systematized, tagged in a standardized fashion, and their bilingual English and Hungarian language Catalog was published online.

All the videos are available for viewing at Blinken OSA’s Research Room, on the intranet within the series HU OSA 305-0-3.

As a result of OSA’s continued efforts and dedication over 2,000 hours of Black Box video work have been catalogued and are accessible in 4 series.

 Thanks to Blinken OSA’s web team a promotional video for the Black Box collection was produced within OSA’s ‘Curator Talks’ podcast series.

 Digitization for long term preservation

Over three thousand hours of raw, unedited video footage was created by the independent media group Black Box Foundation between 1988 and 1996. Black Box was methodically filming at all possible places to document the changes in Hungary. With hand-held VHS and S-VHS cameras, its crews were recording political, social and cultural events; meetings and protests for freedom and independence organized by the - at the time unofficial - opposition parties such as the Alliance of Free Democrats [SZDSZ] or the Alliance of Young Democrats [FIDESZ]; repressed church gatherings; the formation of new parties and trade unions, independent from the communist state's cultural and political "civil" organizations. A substantial amount of the footage documents the waves of mass protests against the later aborted construction of the Bős-Gabčíkovo–Nagymaros dams on the Danube, the environmental issue that triggered the regime change. The uncensored Black Box video collection constitutes an unprecedented audio-visual record of the transition from a communist "party-state" to a pluralist and democratic Hungary. These video materials, only available at Blinken OSA are a unique source of information for historians, sociologists, political science experts, media researchers, and also for media artists and students. In 2017 a further 1000 hours of video footage was digitized. The fragile, over 20–year-old VHS and S-VHS analogue video recordings in single copies have been turned into preservation master AVI files, then into small-size MP4 viewing copies. As a result, the entire series of ’unedited video materials’ is available to the public via Blinken OSA’s intranet in digital video format.

Over the last 23 years, since its establishment in 1995, Blinken OSA has organized over 90 exhibitions related to the Cold War and communism, about historic events and archival concepts, about revolutions and wars, just to name a few themes. Each and every exhibition had video installations, and many of them included accompanying film events. The over 300 analog audio and video cassettes, and hundreds of CDs and DVDs collected by the curators as research material for video installations make up special thematic research collections. Previously only about 5% of these materials were catalogued. In 2017 the AV unit at Blinken OSA pre-arranged these precious, thematic collections, and as a first step towards sharing them with the public digitized them. The approximately 600 hours of sound and video material will be cataloged and made available to researchers in the near future.

HU OSA 362-1-22 Philipp Tibor Collection - audio files (approx. 40 hours)

The collection has been digitized for long term preservation. Its processing is scheduled for 2018.

HU OSA 304-0-17 Sound Recordings Relating to the Conflict in the former Yugoslavia (approx. 50 hours) The collection has been digitized for long term preservation. Its processing is scheduled for 2018.

 HU OSA 13 Soros Foundation - Hungary (SFH)

This collection of documentary films, television and radio programs, and amateur recordings of public events documents the activities of the Soros Foundation Hungary from 1989 to 2004. The collection contains recordings of events at schools, kindergartens and summer camps organized to help the disadvantaged, and in particular Roma communities, as well as several cultural and educational television and radio programs supported by the Foundation. As a first step, approximately 200 hours of video were digitized out of the over 1,000 hours of analog footage.

Acquisitions – new materials at Blinken OSA

In 2017 OSA acquired three exclusively or predominantly audio-visual collections:

HU OSA 364 Béla Nóvé Research Collection on Hungarian 1956 Refugees in the French Legion.

The collection consists of overwhelmingly Cold War era historical resources, explored and produced by the donor, Béla Nóvé, a Hungarian historian and documentary filmmaker from Budapest. As a result of his extended oral historical and archival research, conducted in France and Hungary between 2011 and 2017, Mr. Nóvé’s collection contains 556 GB digital records of archival photographs, films and newsreels on Hungary in 1956, the refugee crisis, the Algerian war of 1954-1962, and the later missions of the French Legion, with altogether some 50 hours of rough materials, rough cuts and the final version of Béla Nóvé’s feature-length documentary: ’Patria nostra: Young Hungarian refugees in the French Foreign Legion’

The collection also contains 5 boxes of textual  materials and photo prints on paper, prearranged by the Donor in June-July 2017.

It includes both private and corporate, digital and paper-based materials relating to some of the 4,000 Hungarian volunteers who joined the French Foreign Legion (FFE) between 1945 and 1956. The records include their letters, diaries, memoirs and photos; a huge collection of archival and edited videos, sound recordings of interviews, and autobiographical questionnaires as well as some classified documents of the French military and Hungarian counterintelligence services, the Hungarian Red Cross and diplomatic organizations.

HU OSA 346 Film and Video by István Jávor on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

The collection includes predominantly raw, unedited film and sound recordings produced by István Jávor for his 3 documentary films related to the 1956 revolution in Hungary. The titles of the final documentary works are Találós kérdések; Krassó Miklós; Történet és háttér.

The collection also includes some research materials for the documentary films, e.g. music and archival newsreel footage.  Some amateur film footage from c. 1935 onwards (for example of György Kmety), collected by István Jávor, is also deposited at Blinken OSA.

Hungarian home movies digital archives

Approximately 500 hours of Hungarian amateur home movies (predominant 1925 - 1985) were brought to OSA by filmmaker Péter Forgács in 2000. In 2017 Forgács handed over the digital preservation master video files to Blinken OSA. This will enable OSA to offer this incomparable collection on its intranet in digital format.

Most of the footage was shot in Hungary, some in Central and Western Europe, some overseas. The majority of the amateur footage provides a special insight into family lives (children, family holidays, travels), though the collection also includes recordings of historic events as seen through private eyes. The recordings of the 1956 Hungarian revolution are particularly valueable.

Digitized video files, preservation master quality MOV videos of Hungarian home movies.: the digital files were created by Péter Forgács in the early 2000s (?), and were delivered to Blinken OSA on 8 3TB external drives. The contents of these drives were moved onto OSA’s servers, and access copy MP4 files were created by Jozsef Bone  from OSA's IT department.

The MOV files are labelled in an unusual way: their naming and numbering is different from that of the items in OSA's Finding Aid of the very same collection, namely HU OSA 320-1-2 Hungarian Home Movies. The correlation between the MOV files and the videos described in OSA's Catalog needs to be matched in order to offer researchers the digital videos. It is essential to pair these items to avoid  having to digitize the nearly 500 hours of videos already held by OSA.

Long term preservation strategy – AV consultancy

OSA has over fourteen thousand hours of moving image and sound collections, created between the 1980s and 1990s. These material are mostly on fragile analog media, video and audio cassettes, whereas a smaller part is on fragile optical media: CD-ROM and DVD-ROM. In order to preserve this collection OSA has hired a consultant. The main task was to assess OSA’s current capability for long-term digital preservation; to define standards, practices, systems, and solutions for digitizing AV content for long-term preservation in the future; and to develop a digital preservation strategy at OSA, including suggestions for solutions/scenarios for implementing the strategy.

OSA was also seeking recommendations on digital asset management, and a tool for preservation management.

Dave Rice from CUNY has been invited as consultant because of his commitment to open source solutions. He is an expert in open source technical solutions of preservation applications, and quality control analytics. He has worked as an archivist or archival consultant at media organizations such as CUNY, Democracy Now, the United Nations, WITNESS, Downtown Community Television, and Bay Area Video Coalition.

Dave Rice, IT and AV units at OSA have worked collaboratively on improvements and refinements to workflow in order to create preservation practices that are more standardized and efficient. Discussions and workshops session with Dave Rice, during his 3-day work visit at OSA as a consultant resulted in recommendations for a report entitled ‘OSA - Digital Preservation Plan’. Based on the report OSA has purchased new analog and digital devices, redesigned its workflows and management tools, committed itself to open source and started a 3-year project aiming at digitization for long term preservation applying new standards and practices. The digitization of the over 14 thousand hours of videos and sound material is foreseen to be completed in 2021.

Policy change with optical media

Optical media CD-ROM and DVD-ROM have proved to be a highly unstable media from the content preservation point of view. In order to manage and maintain moving image, sound and photo collections stored on these media a process of transformatting the electronic records into sustainable hard drives has been started already in 2016. In 2017 the migration of video from optical media onto OSA’s network drive continued. As a result, more and more audio-visual materials exist as digital files, and their access copies are on OSA’s intranet, called ‘Research drive’.

Parallel to this, OSA has stopped producing DVDs. Reference services and other requests are maintained through file transfer, using cloud services.

Editing and publishing videos of conferences and other events at OSA

OSA has a special collection of video documenting OSA’s conferences, exhibitions, book launches and other public events organized at OSA. All of these form part of the fonds called ’HU OSA 206 Records of the Open Society Archives at Central European University’. This material, created during the 23 years of existence of OSA, has been largely recorded onto analog video. In 2017 all of these videos were digitized for both preservation and public access.

The highlights of these recordings were edited into special video series.

The edited, categorized and itemized videos of over 100 conference talks were published on Blinken OSA’s youtube channel in 2017. The conference videos include “George Soros on Economy, Reflexivity and Open Society (2009)”; “Human Dignity Conference”, an international conference held in honor of outgoing Hungarian President Árpád Göncz held at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. (2000); “Blitz Conference on the Republic”, a conference held on the occasion of the 90th birthday of Árpád Göncz, the first President of the third Hungarian Republic (2012). “Prime Time Nationalism” (2016), an international conference and workshop on the lasting effects of nationalistic television broadcasts in the former Yugoslavia republics and “Poverty Revisited. Conference in memoriam István Kemény (2016)”.

Two documentary films about high-school projects

Two films were produced by the AV Unit in 2017. Both of them document high school student projects initiated and organized by OSA which took place at Galeria Centralis.

On 24-25 September, a two-day workshop evoked the spirit of Gaudiopolis, the self-governing children’s republic, with the participation of children from Cseppkő Children’s Home and  Fészek Waldorf School in Solymár - under the creative guidance of Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop, Budapest (AUW). Gaudiopolis. The 8-minute documentary film captures the spirit of the 2-day event.

On 7 November 2017, on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia, OSA organized a student debate on the aims, results and afterlife of revolutions, from an ethical perspective. The event was recorded and edited into a film that is published on OSA’s youtube channel.

Samizdat Archives - Collaboration between AV and the textual unit

The AV Unit has been in charge of preparing a work plan for a newly hired Samizdat Archivist. Identifying the sub-collections within the Soviet Samizdat subfonds HU OSA 300-85; setting up the database’s metadata structure; transferring already existing descriptive metadata of the samizdat collection, thus creating a proto-database; and providing training about descriptive standards were the primary tasks of the AV. The training involved an introduction to the best practices of archival work: creating entries within the Finding Aid (item level cataloging); and ’series level descriptions’ in ISAD-G standards. In 2017 the cataloging of the Published Samizdat series HU OSA 300-85-9, comprising of over 6,000 records (with readily available legacy metadata from the Memorial database) was the number one project.

It is established that thanks to a well-defined and well prepared work plan and the dedication of the Samizdat Archivist two more (already fully processed and catalogued, but never before published) series, the ‘Subject files’ and ‘Biographical files’ of the ’ Soviet Samizdat, were put on-line in 2017.

CEU & OSA collaboration: research and podcast production

Sound–RESounds: Research and Sonic Production from Blinken Open Society Archives’ Sound Collections

In 2017 OSA and CEU announced Sound–RESounds – a unique opportunity for two CEU students to spend three funded months within Blinken OSA’s most sonically dynamic archives. The research required the exploration and study of audio collections at OSA and it led to the production of a series of original podcasts.

Working under the supervision of a Blinken OSA mentor and a member of CEU’s ‘Sound Relations’ team, two chosen researchers worked within one or more of seven selected audio collections. By the end of the three-month period the researchers had conceived and produced original audio outputs based on the collections, a podcast mini-series entitled ‘Speaking to the Soviets’ which consists of 6 episodes. This brilliant podcast is based on OSA’s unique on-line collection of RFE/RL’s Russian language broadcasts 1953-1995.

Film screenings related to OSA exhibitions

On 27 October 2017 for the first time OSA joined UNESCO’s initiative and on the occasion of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage organized an event including a presentation on archiving films and a film screening using 16mm celluloid originals, with a focus on the history and processing of a collection of Soviet films held in Budapest. 
This event was also the launch of Blinken OSA’s video collection campaign. Our goal is to collect, preserve, digitize and make accessible for research amateur films, videos and sound recordings from the Cold War and the Socialist period. Our purpose is to save these reels of film and video and audio tapes from oblivion and to bring them together in a collection open to all to research. 
With this event Blinken OSA wished to emphasize the importance of creating and implementing strict professional rules for archiving and preservation, and to stress the fact that not sharing and making these materials accessible would leave us only halfway down the road. By making this collection of Soviet propaganda films available online, OSA calls on all producers of publicly funded films, videos and sound recordings to share these products and to make them available for research free of charge. 

Shooting the Revolution Film Series at OSA – Animated Soviet Propaganda 1 &2 March-May, 2017

In the period between 1924 and the launch of Perestroika in 1985, more than 40 animated propaganda films were produced in the Soviet Union. They weren't for export. Their public was the new nation and their goal was to win over the hearts and minds of the Soviet masses by feeding them disinformation. The primary target of the animated propaganda films was the United States. It was important to keep the Soviet people – most of whom were locked up in the USSR – believing that they lived in the best country in the world. From the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, Americans were depicted as evil racists, unemployed, exploited workers and warmongers. Harmful and devastating in their effect, these animated propaganda films are artistically as powerful and beautiful as the great Soviet political posters made after the 1917 revolution which inspired Soviet animation.
While ‘Soviet Propaganda Animation 1’ in March 2017 was dedicated to the early works, this session includes a selection of films produced between 1949 and 1979. The incredibly bizarre world of animated Soviet propaganda, part 1 and part 2 screenings were a huge success.

OSA’s Film Library Catalog is now integrated into CEU’s main Library Catalog

The catalog of OSA’s Film Library has been integrated into CEU’s Library Catalog. The collection consists of over 4,000 titles, with an exceptionally broad range of documentary, propaganda and fiction films. The films are in almost 100 languages and focus on the Cold War, Communism, international human rights abuses and war crimes. The Film Library also contains all the films submitted to the Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

The work described above was accomplished by the permanent and temporary team members, and interns at the AV Unit: Gergely Andrási (intern), Alexey Zelensky (Russian broadcast archivist), Zoltán Krizbai (AV technician), Dariusz Krolikowski (Editor, Assistant archivist), Judit Krausz (Project archivist), Judit Hegedűs (Reference services officer), Zsuzsa Zádori (Senior AV Archivist).