The Yugoslavia Archive Project (YAP) is both a curated collection and an archival research lab of the Blinken OSA Archivum (the Archivum), which comprises over 35,000 records covering the historical changes in the socio-political, economic, and cultural landscape in the Yugoslav region from WWII to 2010. The collection brings together text, still and moving image and sound records in multiple languages in analog and digital format from across the archives.

The documents in the collection are being reprocessed and recontextualized according to a critical and self-reflexive archival methodology devised specifically for this project, which aims at enhancing descriptive metadata to ensure diversified, multiple access points to the materials. At the same time, it allows for discovering novel relational patterns, interactions, and cross-references among relevant archival sources. This methodological approach is entrenched within archival initiatives committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and social justice through the creation of more inclusive descriptions of the records.

The YAP is a work in progress performed by an international team of archival professionals and students in information science, international relations, law, nationalism studies, philosophy, and political science, many of whom come from the former Yugoslavia. We have already reprocessed parts of the collections using the critical and self-reflexive archival methodology and we continue to add further materials as they become available. Many of the included records remain described by international descriptive standards traditionally used across the Archivum. When searching the holdings of the YAP, you will therefore find analog and digital materials represented by metadata of different levels of granularity.