The Yugoslavia Archive Project (YAP) is both a curated collection and an archival research lab of Blinken OSA, which comprises over 30,000 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 included documents are reprocessed and recontextualized according to a geo-temporally simultaneous and self-reflexive archival methodology developed specifically for this project, which aims at enhancing descriptive metadata to ensure diversified, multiple access to and reveal the multivocality of the sources. This objective of the project stems from and promotes human rights and social justice archival initiatives for creating more inclusive records description. At the same time, it allows for discovering relational patterns, interactions and cross-references among the sources in an informed and innovative manner.

The YAP is a work in progress performed by an international team of archival professionals and students in information science, nationalism studies, international relations, philosophy, law and political science and theory, many of whom come from the former Yugoslavia. We have already reprocessed some of the collections by the means of this new method and we continue to add further materials as they become available. Many of the records still remain described by international standards traditionally used across Blinken OSA. When searching the holdings of the YAP, you will therefore find analog and digital materials represented by metadata of different levels of granularity.