MU ArchiveS

Director: PhDr. Jiří Pulec

The Masaryk University Archives are an integral part of the network of Czech Republic Archives, in which it holds a place of special importance. Its main role is to take care of archival documents produced in the operation of the university, faculties, and the university's other institutions. The archives also store written material from estates of important university personalities and the documents of learned and professional societies and associations whose activities were, or still are, connected with Masaryk University. The list of all holdings and collections deposited in the MU Archives in 2001 include 183 items. The overall volume of all archive materials deposited at present is about 1,700 standard meters. The documents are mostly stored in the central archives at the Faculty of Law, and in a depository at the Faculty of Medicine at Komenského Square, which is the only, albeit insufficient, back-up archival facility.

The Archives' activities in 2001 were focused primarily on processing study files, which arrived to the Archives in extraordinary large quantities last year, especially from the Faculties of Medicine and Education. Also processed were large volumes of University documents, especially from the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Great attention was devoted to the processing of archival photographic collections under the grant project of the Institute of Computer Science on the "Digitalisation of Photographic Collections at MU". In 2001, a large collection of the MU Archives C fot I – Portrait Photographs of MU Personalities" was digitalized. For this project, the MU Archives provided basic biographical data on the people portrayed. For the ICS, the Archives also prepared a photo gallery of Rectors and Deans of several faculties with notes. These were published on the university web pages.

Research into MU history was carried out as part of the Grant Agency of the CR's project 409/00/0130 "The History of University Education in Moravia From 1945 to 1999". As part of the same grant project, research work also continued in archives in Brno (Moravian Regional Archives, Brno Municipal Archives) and in Prague (State Central Archives, the Prague Municipal Archives, and the Archives of Charles University. The results of the research have been published in a number of thematic papers.

The establishment of the Archives' exhibition room at the Faculty of Medicine has made a number of exhibitions possible. In May, an exhibition on the University's first Rector, Karel Engliš, was organized in cooperation with the School of Economics and the MU Faculty of Law. In October, the exhibition was transferred to Olomouc. At the end of the year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the commencement of studies at the Faculty of Arts, a large exhibition of documents and other artefacts from the history of the FoA was opened in the Archives' exhibition room.