The Security Services Archive Launches its Digital Archive Project

Prague, July 10, 2009 – The Security Services Archive, in cooperation with the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, launched the pilot phase of its Digital Archive Project today. Interested parties are now able to browse digitized archival records in any of the Archive’s research rooms (two in Prague and one in Kanice near Brno). The Digital Archive project is a follow up on the “Open Past” project initiated by the Ministry of the Interior in 2007.

New options are thus opening up to the public with respect to working with the archives of the former security services of Communist Czechoslovakia. Whereas until now it had been possible to review digitized versions only of those materials that the researcher had specifically requested, now researchers will themselves be able to browse through all archival materials stored to date in the Digital Archive.

The Security Services Archive administers almost 20 kilometers of archival materials and about 400,000 sheets of microfiche, amounting to about 280 million pages of archival materials. The Institute has begun the transfer of more than 4 million already scanned pages to the Digital Archive. As of this writing, several tens of thousands of pages of archival materials have been checked and are available for viewing in the Archive’s research rooms; these will be continuously supplemented.

The Digital Archive Project now enables viewers to print materials directly in its research rooms; by the fall of 2009 the service should be improved to enable the burning of CDs or DVDs. The goal for next year is to provide secure remote access to the Digital Archive, whereby anyone, upon signing an electronic research request form, will for the duration of one year be able to browse the digitized materials directly from his own computer. Concerning Czech citizens, we are considering the option of using the new system of electronic data boxes in combination with password access, as is done, for instance, in electronic banking.

We believe that this step will further increase the understanding of archival materials documenting the functioning of the former security services of Communist Czechoslovakia. It is a logical response to the increasing interest in the archival materials administered by the Archive, taking advantage of 21st century technologies.

Over the course of 2008, the first year of the Archive’s existence, Archive staff looked up a significant number of archival documents in response to research requests and provided them to historians, journalists and other researchers. From February through the end of the year, 1,526 researchers visited the Archive’s research rooms. A number of these returned multiple times, as the statistics indicate a total of 4,122 visits, during which 39,878 archival units were made available.

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