COURAGE

connecting collections

The Archive of Masaryk University was founded in 1936. At the beginning it mainly managed documents from the Rectorate, faculties and institutes, and from the 1960s it began to search for personal possessions belonging to important university scholars. As of 2017, there are 135 such funds. Besides them, the content of such typical collections and materials being kept in archives visual: photographs, pictures, audio-visual records, but also textiles, models etc. At the time of socialism, when the archives in Czechoslovakia were strictly centralised into the hierarchical network of territorial archives, the Archive of Masaryk University was the only official archive of the institution outside the capital city Prague.

The Communist Party History Institute was established in 1946 as a subdivision of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow. The main aim of the Institute was to translate into Lithuanian and publish the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. The Institute collected documentation relating to the communist movement in Lithuania, and carried out research on the topic.

Archive and Programme Funds is an archive department of Czech Television, formerly Czechoslovak Television, with three workplaces in Prague, Brno and Ostrava. Although some audiovisual programmes and documents have been deposited on Czechoslovak television since its establishment in 1953, a separate television archive was formed only in 1965. In spite of gaining independence and, later, the status of being an archive of special importance, APF continued to struggle with both low capacity and technically unsuitable depositories. However, the archive managed to get five grants that continue to the present: the Telemagnetic and Digital Audiovisual Recordings Fund, the Film Fund, the Audiovisual Fund, the Photo Fund and the Fund of Documents.

Throughout the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, APF was indirectly subordinated to state power and did not participate in alternative culture. However, the work of the archive was not just pro-regime - the archivists could only process pieces of work and associated materials produced and broadcast by the Television, on the other hand, they did so according to the generally accepted rules of archiving and historiography. Thanks to this, the archive owns a huge number of original materials without post-production changes that can be used in current scientific research.

Nowadays, APF is primarily responsible for the management of all audiovisual records of the Television, including their technical preparation and distribution for CT departments. At the same time, it documents some of the older audiovisual programmes and takes over and catalogs documents. The archive also provides research and information services to a wide range of users - from creators who are involved in Czech Television production to external researchers who come to study. APF, as part of Czech Television, has an extensive amount of technical equipment (including film laboratories) and professional staff that enable digitization, transcription and restoration of most archival records. In recent years, APF CT was intensively devoted to the digitization of all funds to ensure their rescue and accessibility for the needs of the Television as well as for the public.

According to Adas Pliopa, the archivist at the Kaunas Drama Theatre, the archive of the theatre is under the supervision of the Lithuanian Archive of Literature and Art. Because of this, it should formally keep plans of files of the nomenclature and periodically transfer material to the Lithuanian Archive of Literature and Art. According to Pliopa, this system of file nomenclature and responsibility of the Lithuanian Archive of Literature and Art was established in 2004. After that, the archivist collected all the material that was in the theatre in one archive. 
Nevertheless, the material from the theatre's archive is not limited to bureaucratic activity by the theatre. At the initiative of actors and other workers, the theatre collects and keeps manuscripts, drafts and photographss about the history of the theatre. Because of this, the archive of the theatre not only has material about the current activities of the theatre, but also material that is interesting in the sense of cultural opposition. Drafts, photographs and manuscripts of scripts of plays made in the hand of the theatre director may be interesting to researchers. On the other hand, this kind of material does not have an inventory. Therefore, anyone who is interested in researching theatre history should apply directly to the theatre archivist Adas Pliopa.