Events today can usually only be explained through the past. Making plans for the future is usually more difficult if developments which took place in the past cannot be included in the process. That is why the importance of historical research should not be underestimated, as it means the interpretation of our collective memory is a reliable and complete as it can be. There are archival repositories for governments and state documents almost everywhere worldwide. There are also provisions for corporate archives and those of churches. But the often poorly organized and sometimes dangerous terrains of groups which rebel against the established order and attempt to emancipate themselves, are not usually covered by these institutions, even though the study of these movements can be of crucial importance for a responsible interpretation of contemporary political and social developments.

The International Institute of Social History (IISH) began life as a private initiative and, over the years, it has come to see its primary task as preserving and making accessible socio-historical material for historical study. Since its founding in 1935 the IISH has taken care of the "paper legacy", as archives could be defined, of these social movements.

Traditionally, the thematic emphasis of the IISH archival collections has been on the labour movement and its divergent currents. During the Institute's early years the papers of many of the labour movements' founding fathers, like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel or Wilhelm Liebknecht and the records of organizations like the Russian Partija Socialistov-Revoljucionerov (PSR) or the Spanish Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the library of Max Nettlau, laid the basis of its collections. Before the outbreak of World War II, it succeded in rescuing numerous threatened collections from Nazi Germany, Austria and Spain and transporting them to the safety of the neutral Netherlands. But archives relating to other movements - so called "new" social movements (e.g. the peace movement, human rights organizations and campaigns for environmental protection) have been collected as well. To this day the IISH continues this pursuit with more than 2500 archives, which includes the records of the anti-nuclear movement and the 1989 Chinese student democratic movement, parties, trade unions, the recently deposited records of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), Amnesty International and Greenpeace International.

In addition to these archives, the IISH has accumulated a unique library of about one million printed volumes on social history (part consists of the rarest copies of periodicals and pamphlets) and a valuable collection has been assembled of roughly as many audiovisual items, including almost one million photographs, photo negatives, posters, banners, audio and videotapes. The Institute, in collaboration with the Antenna fundation, established a project aimed at archiving important digital documents concerning social, political and environmental issues.

Today the electronical archive contains nearly 900.000 messages from 974 Newsgroups and starts (with inclusion of my personal research) to save also URL Web sites: in many cases, electronical documents are indeed the only archives we can use to understand groups or individual "activists".

International Institute of Social History
Cruquiusweg 31, NL-1019 AT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Telephone: +31-20-66 858 66, Telefax: +31-20-66 541 81
URL : http://www.iisg.nl
inf.gen@iisg.nl (General Information) ; collection.info@iisg.nl

Communicated by:

Franck Dubois
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
(on leave from: Universite de Bourgogne)
E-mail: fdu@iisg.nl