The UHEC archives holds hundreds of diverse collections of historical significance. These include personal papers of individuals both well-known and "ordinary", records of Ukrainian churches, religious and secular organizations, Ukrainian recorded sound, and records of genealogical interest. Most of the UHEC's archives holdings are from the 20th century and were created by Ukrainian emigrants or exiles outside of Ukraine, particularly the post-World War II refugee wave. Given the Center's history, it is not surprising that holdings are particularly strong in the history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, but the collections span everything from Ukrainian diaspora politics to tomato breeding.
The UHEC is concerned about the loss of historical memory when documents, letters, photographs and other materials are lost or thrown away by individuals or families in an overzealous attempt to "get rid of trash" that "nobody will be interested in", particularly if they're written in a funny alphabet that nobody in the family can read. Well, we're interested: these collections of "ordinary" papers of "ordinary" people give personal context to history! Please get in touch with us about possible gifts to our collections.
How to access the archives
All processed archives collections are open for on-site, in-person research use free of charge by appointment. The UHEC welcomes all researchers, including high school students and elementary school students ages 10 and above. Minors must have a chaperone, and children under 10 years of age are not permitted in research areas.
Researchers must contact the archives staff to discuss their needs and to arrange visit date(s). All archives access is by appointment only, and arrangements must be made directly with the archives staff (archives@UkrHEC.org) as early as possible, preferably several weeks in advance. All researchers are required to complete, sign, and return a registration form prior to their arrival at the Center. Researchers must present a photo ID and agree to abide by the Center's rules and regulations and pay any fees for high-resolution images and permission to publish.
Patrons are permitted to take their own digital photographs of archival items (subject to restrictions) for their personal and research use without fee.
Depending on researcher needs, we may be able to accommodate remote researchers and provide limited on-demand digitization. Please contact the archives. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the UHEC's holdings are not digitized or accessible online. Here's why.
How to find information in archives
Unlike in library cataloging, archives do not attempt to create a complete inventory of all of the items held in the repository, as that would be a nearly impossible task. Instead, materials are grouped into "collections", which are typically records of an organization, family, or individual that have been created or accumulated through the course of their lives or activities.
Each collection is described in a "finding aid", which contains critical information about who created or assembled it, their biographical and historical context, the types of materials present, the date rage of record keeping that gave rise to the collection, the physical extent of the records (in linear feet), the language(s) of the materials, and how the collection is organized (its "arrangement"). Below that is administrative information, followed by an inventory of the boxes and folders that contain the materials, possibly with additional description and other details. When you search in a finding aid, you are not searching the actual archival documents, but only a higher-level description of groups of those documents.
To effectively find information in an archives, you have to think from the point of view of how the records were created. In other words, you need to consider who might have created, received, or saved records related to the topic and time period that you are interested in. For example, if you are interested in finding letters written by a certain famous individual, you would actually need to think about who that individual might have written to, as that is who might have saved the letters.
Archives research is in general much more difficult than looking things up in books or on the Internet, since often neither you nor even the archivist knows whether the information you are looking for even exists in a given collection, and it may be necessary to slog through many folders (or boxes) of papers to find out.
If you have any questions about archival research, or how to interpret a finding aid, please feel free to contact archives@UkrHEC.org
Browse all of the finding aids for the UHEC's collections.
Digitization plans
These days, it seems that people think everything is online, and if it's not online, then it doesn't exist. Unfortunately, this will never be true for archives anytime in the foreseeable future (not just at the UHEC, but at all archives).
The UHEC Archives currently performing any large-scale digitization of its paper-based holdings.
There are several reasons behind this decision:
- Many of the collections held in the Ukrainian History and Education Center Archives were donated decades ago, often with less-than-adequate deed of gift or copyright transfer. Ascertaining the ownership of the copyright for many of the materials in the Center's collections is often extremely difficult, and our publication of them on the Internet could constitute copyright infringement. We do not currently have the staff time or resources to do the necessary copyright ownership research.
- Although our holdings are relatively small compared to other archival repositories, we are also extremely short-staffed. We simply do not have the personnel that would be necessary to execute a large-scale digitization effort in a professional manner.
- We have instead chosen to focus staff resources on processing and making accessible the many hidden collections that still have not seen the light of day, and to preserve at-risk media.
While we would love to maximize the accessibility of our holdings, there is only so much we can do at the present time.
Currently, we are digitizing only those materials that are in serious danger of being lost due to media decay (such as magnetic tape-based audio recordings from the 1950-90s). We hope to scan and make available online some of our most-requested materials. However, these will be available only as page images and not as searchable text (since they are hand-written and cannot be easily converted using OCR).