OSA is an open-access facility committed to making research materials available to researchers and the wider public free of charge. Our Research Room is freely accessible to the public and offers a friendly environment for quiet study. Online workstations, microform and audiovisual equipment, and free digital reproduction services are provided. Free wireless internet connectivity is available throughout the premises.
To be able to use the Research Room, visitors need to register and sign the Researcher Statement. Download form here and send back by email or fill out the paper copy on your first visit.
Researchers are welcome to bring their own notebooks, laptops, pen drives, digital cameras and portable scanners. Mobile phones should only be used in silent mode. For storing your personal belongings, we provide lockers on the ground floor, which require a HUF 100 coin deposit. Please note that no food, drink or smoking is allowed in the Research Room.
It is strictly forbidden to use computers for watching inappropriate content which might disturb the integrity of researchers in the Research Room. Violating this rule involves immediate and irrevocable banning from the premises of Blinken OSA.
Research Room staff are available to help with any general inquiries about the collections, to guide researchers in the use of our online catalogs, and to facilitate requests for materials and reproduction services; more in-depth consultations with senior archivists can also be arranged. Regretfully, we do not have the resources to carry out research on-demand.
Most of our archival materials are stored on site and can be delivered to the Research Room within 15 minutes of a request being submitted. A portion of our library collection is, however, held off-site, and requests for these materials should be made two days in advance. Please be aware that requests for materials are not processed after 4:45 p.m.
Before visiting, we recommend that all potential researchers familiarize themselves with the scope and structure of our archival, library and audiovisual holdings, as well as with our Access and Privacy Policy.
For reproduction of audiovisual material or remote reproduction requests, we also provide formal Reproduction Services. We strongly encourage researchers to make digital copies of paper records in consultation with staff. Researchers are welcome to bring their own reproduction equipment, and can also use our digital cameras.
Our Holdings
OSA’s non-circulating holdings are available to researchers in the Research Room. Our reference library items—dictionaries, biographical and other reference works to assist with research—come mostly from the former Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reference library, supplemented and updated with more recent publications. Our library collection is constantly expanding, with the most recent acquisitions and specialist magazines on display in the Research Room.
OSA has a number of curated collections online. We also host dedicated work stations where on-site researchers can access the Hungarian National Audiovisual Archives (NAVA), and over one million digitized pages of the Electronic Archives of the Communist International (Comintern). Hundreds of electronic journals and databases, including the Court Records Database of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are also accessible at our dedicated workstations.
In exchange for free on-site digital reproduction, we ask researchers to share their digital copies with others by uploading them to the Parallel Archive, an online storage, management, and research tool designed for the scholarly community. By uploading your documents, you will help us realize our goal of expanding and extending access to archival sources, and contribute to a collaborative research environment.