Department of Personal Fonds and Institutional Fonds to 1952

This Department takes care of more than 300 archive fonds and collections (approx. 1.5 km of archive materials). Some of them originated in the activities of older research institutes that existed up until around the time that CSAS was established (a total of 38, the most important of which included the Royal Bohemian Learned Society, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Czechoslovak National Research Council and the Masaryk Academy of Labour). Another part comprises the personal fonds of prominent researchers (e.g. Bedřich Hrozný, Jaroslav Heyrovský, Otto Wichterle, Zdeněk Nejedlý, Karel Domin and Milada Paulová). Archive materials that have been entrusted to us are
progressively processed and made available (inventories, archive aids, catalogues, special publications and studies). The Department provides information and research on and from the fonds and takes part in the Institute's research, publication and popularization activities. An ongoing task at the Department is to seek and acquire personal papers (a selection of archive material from outside safe document disposal procedures) and to acquire further supplementary sources for oral history. On the basis of interviews with prominent researchers and witnesses of the development of science and scholarship over the last fifty years a Catalogue of Contemporary Witness Interviews has been compiled. Important archive fonds include that of the interwar German research institute based in Liberec in Czechoslovakia – Sudetendeutsche Anstalt für Landes- und Volksforschung, the first part of which (the Sudeten German Archive) has been provided
with an inventory and is fully accessible. The Department is preparing a bibliography of CASA documents for the entire duration of its existence (1891–1952), which will be made available online on the Institute's website. The Department is also involved in the Academy of Sciences Grant Agency Project Scholarly Exile from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences 1953-1989 and the Academy of Sciences Grant Agency Project Czech Feminist Thought in the 19th and 20th Centuries. This year will see the start of work on the organization of the extensive personal fonds of Zdeněk Nejedlý.