Emigrants’ and Exiles’ Archives: Challenges of Accessibility

The Round Table Discussion
Co-organizers:
University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
University of Lausanne (Switzerland)
Institute of History of Ukraine, of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Ukraine)
Emigration, whether individual or mass, has been an integral part of human history for centuries. During the twentieth century the preservation of the documentary heritage of emigrant communities had become part of institutional archival practice. Nevertheless, emigrant heritage as an object of archiving, research and representation remains a challenging field for both historians and archivists.

Life in emigration was usually accompanied by repeated changes of place/country of residence in search of a better life. Therefore, the search for historical sources created by emigrants usually involves historians in a transnational research journey, at each stage of which testimonies may potentially be found. The place of discovery can be both archival institutions and unexpected places such as private collections, family archives or even flea markets.
Emigration is a variable phenomenon. In the case of emigration caused by political reasons, political institutions, such as governments, were exiled. With them went their documentation. The further fate of these archives in exile was often tragic due to the difficulties of finding a place to store them, disputes over ownership, and the logistical and financial problems of transporting and preserving rather large collections. During the Second World War there was an unprecedented level of appropriation and transfer of archives from occupied territories, when archives became a kind of trophy and object of competition between the warring sides. The turbulent political history, especially that of the twentieth century, has made the archival heritage of emigration even more fragmented and therefore difficult to identify. In order to trace the history of historians’ emigration it is necessary to engage with numerous archives. These are often separated not only geographically by state borders or oceans, but also by specific national archival systems.
Fragmented, scattered, geographically distant “archives of emigration/exile” raise questions about their accessibility and, consequently, about the reliability of historical research, the visibility and representation of emigrants and exiles in history.
Emigrant archives, like exile archives, are a matter of distribution and interaction between archival institutions. For example, there is a tradition of cooperation between archives that involves the transfer of copies or originals of certain collections to the emigrants’ country of origin. However, these cases are often part of cultural diplomacy, sanctioned at the level of intergovernmental cooperation, and are not a systematic practice for archives. It seems that we still have few tools for bringing together fragmented and scattered emigration archives, which would greatly facilitate access to them for researchers.
During the discussion, we would like to raise the issue of how fragmented and scattered documentary sources on the history of emigration or exile archives could be brought together. Does this involve physically accumulating such sources in one place, sharing archival collections through new digital technologies, or creating inter-archival digital search systems? What are the potential opportunities for thematic digital archives created by combining documents from different archival institutions? What are the legal and technical challenges facing such platforms? How can historians promote interaction between archives?
The discussion will bring together archivists, historians and specialists working in the field of digitisation.
We plan to review the experiences of projects aimed at improving access to archival collections on emigration and to discuss promising areas for future work. The meeting is not only an opportunity for historians and archival institutions to exchange experiences and ideas, but also a platform for establishing closer contacts between those who work with and preserve a shared/divided archival heritage.