The Ethnographic Research in Dobrogea Ad-Hoc Collection at the ASTRA Museum (Colecţia Ad-Hoc Cercetarea Dobrogeană) reflects the activities carried out between 1964 and 1989 by collaborative teams of ethnographers, photographers, and architects to rescue and recover the cultural heritage of villages in the region of Dobrogea, which were affected by forced collectivisation and the building of the Danube–Black Sea Canal.
The Ethnological Archives was created in 1938. It is the central archives of Hungarian ethnography and gives insight into both the shaping of an intellectual, alternative tradition to the official ideology of the party-state, and into the practices of preserving the pre-communist cultural heritage. The history of the Archives aptly illustrates the difficulty in sharply distinguishing the roles of cultural opposition and cooperation in the socialist period as it also contains ethnographical collections created by research projects serving contemporary political and ideological goals.