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This paper examines digital archiving policies of open access (OA) electronic scholarly journals in Central Europe. The research sample consists of 1589 journals from nine Central European countries registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Results show that of the 1589 journals, 69% of them have an archiving policy. In terms of the number of indexed journals, Poland ranks first with 592 journals. Switzerland is at the forefront of digital archiving with 89% of archived journals. It was also found that Portico and national libraries are the most widely used archives, and that 19% of the preserved journals are archived in more than one archive. A preliminary analysis was also conducted to investigate the possible existence of a relationship between journal rank and digital archiving. The results show a higher number of JCR indexed titles, as well as a higher ranking, among archived journals. The paper also compares the status of archiving policies among Asian and Central European countries. The results reveal that archived journals are significantly more represented in Central European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fonds of Crown Chancery Public Register ("Metrica Regni") was chosen for the pilot project to introduce Encoded Archival Description (EAD) because of its historical value, typical archival structure and existing finding aids. The rights and privileges granted by Polish kings were recorded in the Register. The oldest books in the series of registrations ("Libri Inscriptionum") began in the middle of the fifteenth century. This paper discusses how the Polish EAD project was completed from the fall of 2003 by the staff of the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. It started with the theoretical background and ended with practical work with a Polish HTML editor--"Pajaczek" (Little Spider). The data were prepared and exported from a Microsoft Access database and a Microsoft Word editor into an XML file. After validations and corrections, the stylesheet from the "EAD Cookbook" was adopted as a delivery method. On 29 July 2004 the first version of the inventory of Crown Chancery Public Register in EAD was published on the Web site of the Central Archives of Historical Records. (Contains 2 tables and 12 notes.)

After the Second World War the Polish-Slovak borderland became a zone of serious tensions. Particularly controversial is the activity of the Polish partisan group "Błyskawica", led by Józef Kuraś "Ogień". The soldiers are responsible for takings of private property and acts of violence carried out in villages in South Poland that were inhabited mostly by Slovaks. This paper - based mainly on the query at the Archives of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance - aims to present the scale and circumstances of those activities. The work takes wider historical context into account and uses selected anthropological and sociological theories. In this perspective, it seems justified to explain the analyzed events through the mechanism of revenge, widespread in the post-war period of anomie and crisis. Sources indicate that the Polish partisans' actions from the years 1946-1947 were not attempts to pacify the Slovak separatists (although some authors claim so) but rather repressions for the earlier actions of members of that nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to rising temperatures worldwide many areas are threatened with increasing numbers of fire occurrence. Poland is among these areas and is projected to experience over the next century an increase in both heat stress and wildfire activity with the potential to turn its fire-resistant forests into fire-prone forests. This paper aims to provide an introduction to the conditions favourable to fire occurrence in Poland, summarising the research on sedimentary charcoal analysis and reviewing fire reconstructions based on natural archives from Poland. Here, natural wildfires occurred at the beginning of the Holocene but, due to changes in climate (wetter summers) and vegetation after 6550 BC, the main trigger of fire occurrence became human activity, mainly as a result of forest clearance for agrarian purposes. However, there is evidence that prolonged droughts also triggered wildfires. Over recent decades, according to existing data, arson (44.85%) and negligence (34.43%) have been the most common causes of fire occurrence in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat made significant contributions to nuclear physics and worked on the development of the atomic bomb. He walked out of the Manhattan Project after working there for less than a year, the only scientist to do so. Rotblat gave a comprehensive account of his time at Los Alamos. His Archive is now becoming available and papers contained therein are inconsistent with some aspects of his account. The reasons as to how such anomalies and contradictions could occur are considered.

Recent years have witnessed contentious public debates in Poland, as in other Eastern European countries, concerning the public uses of the Communist Secret Service files and the ensuing politics of history and memory of the state socialist past. The key terms of these debates are articulated mainly by the liberal and conservative elites, within an abstractly conceived national history/memory framework that does not address the conflicts across class lines, or recognize the “estranged” of the new Poland, who remember the recent past “positively.” Departing from the national history/memory framework, this paper calls for another kind of history: one that is minor as it is global. Drawing on a file compiled by the Polish Communist Secret Service on a certain self‐identified socialist from Turkey, who migrated to Poland in the late 1980s, I attempt to provide a parallel history to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I read the file not only for what we can gather from it, but also for what we cannot know from what is positively presented by it. Concentrating on the fragmented, minor, inconclusive story of this politically engaged working man, I call for the use of Communist Secret Service archives to produce a global history of socialisms and of the Cold War that traces the lives and movements across the Second and Third Worlds. In so doing, I gesture to what Karol Modzelewski has suggested in a different but related context as “loyalty to the strangers/the unknown ones” (lojalność wobec nieznajomych). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the losses of Polish libraries and archives in Lower Silesia, Poland during the Great Flood of 1977. It provides an overview of the rescue operations and preventive measures undertaken by disaster-struck libraries and the voluntary help that put into action through the use of media particularly the internet. It concludes that it is a necessity to develop disaster and emergency preparedness programs in libraries to avoid massive loss.

The article presents a concise history of Polish folk tale from oral – analogue – beginnings to the digital collections of today. First, the storytelling tradition in Poland is described, secondly, an overview is given on folk tale collections and on the Polish research tradition, and, finally, the current digital folk tale archives are introduced in more detail. The focus of the article is about the recent development of online folk tale indexes and collections by popularising the very rich Polish folk tale documentation and scholarship as a valuable part of the European and global intangible heritage in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documents preserved in the Russian State Historical Archives shed light on the acquisition by Empress Catherine II of the renowned collection of classical sculpture assembled by the antiquary Lyde Browne (d. 1787) – its purchase, arrival and first display in the pavilions of the imperial summer residence in Tsarskoe Selo near St Petersburg. The date for the sale, once assumed to have been 1787, is most widely accepted as 1785, or, as recently suggested, 1784. In fact, there are two dates – 1783 and 1784 – as established by Catherine's payments (a total sum equivalent to £22,630) for the sculptures as delivered. The archival lists show considerably more items than does the catalogue of Browne's collection from 1779, while the dispersal of Catherine's collection of antiquities by her son, Paul I, a partial export to Poland, the formation of the Imperial Hermitage Museum, and later events all contribute to the complex history of the Lyde Browne sculptures in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview with the authors of How to Look Natural In Photos, a 2021 photobook featuring images from archives containing secret police records from Poland before 1989, Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica outline their approach to the republication of this material. They reflect on the nature of images which represent violence or trauma alongside the seemingly banal photographs of mundane scenes and objects recorded by the security forces, as well as the ethics of reproducing portraits of secret police officers. The material on which the book is based is in the possession of Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (The Institute of National Remembrance), an organization created in 1998 by act of the Polish parliament that has been subject of heated debate in the country. Critics have accused it of producing an overly simple view of modern Polish history, one populated by heroes, victims and villains. Bartecka and Rusznica reflect on their relations with this institution and the potential for open interpretations of such material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in the ideological and political training of the communist party was one of the fundamental duties for its members and individual organizations. Its primary goal was to maintain the proper ideological level of members, create a scheme for promotion in the party’s hierarchy and indirectly, to gradually increase the party’s influence on society. A training system was permanent, applicable to everyone and perpetual in order to shape and consolidate a uniform communist mentality, along with faithfulness and dedication to the organization. It was not only a way to improve the qualifications necessary for party and bureaucratic work, but above all to maintain party activists in constant ideological readiness. The forms of communist training, which were conducted in voivodeship party structures in Poland in 1975-1990, such as candidates’s training, mass training, activists’ training along with the Evening University of Marxism-Leninism, circle training, lecturers’ training, prove that the communist party attached great significance to this aspect at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Historical ethnobotanical studies are important, even if they are only descriptive, because they help to throw light on the missing chains needed for diachronic analysis. However, the documentation of traditional uses of plants in some countries, e.g. Ukraine, is still fragmentary. The aim of this contribution is to fill the gap and present a portion of the data set, from western Ukraine, which was collected by Adam Fischer, a Polish ethnographer from Lviv, in the 1930s. These data were originally gathered to be published in the first part of the Lexicon of Slavic beliefs and customs, dedicated to plant uses in traditional Slavonic culture. The idea of writing the Lexicon arose in 1929 during the I Congress of Slavic Philologists in Prague and was intended to be a joint international enterprise, but has never actually been fulfilled. Methods: In this article we used information from south-eastern Poland at that time -- nowadays western Ukraine, collected in four provinces, 11 counties and 28 localities by Fischer's collaborators. The majority of the information was accompanied by voucher specimens, which were determined by botanists at the Jan Kazimierz University. These data are still unpublished and stored on filecards in the archives of the Polish Ethnological Society in Wrocław, Poland. In our analysis we applied two indices: one to measure general plant versatility -- Use Value, and another regarding medicinal plants -- Relative Importance Value. Results: In total, 179 plant taxa used in peasant culture in the western Ukraine in the 1930s were registered. The species which achieved the highest Use Values were: Achillea millefolium, Allium sativum, Vinca minor, Hypericum sp. and Juniperus communis. Among the collected plant names, Polish names dominate (59 %) over clearly Ukrainian and Ruthenian ones (31 %). The remaining 10 % of names were of unclear origin or could have been used by both groups. The most salient use categories were medicinal, followed by ritual -- chiefly plants used in church ceremonies, followed by animal wellbeing (veterinary and fodder). However we learn very little about plant management in the peasant culture from the data set. Conclusions: Analysis of the archival data threw new light on plant use and management in the Galicja region in the interwar period. It also increased our understanding of the central role of plants in spheres such as folk medicine, church ceremonies and animal wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The files of the Plock-Ciechanów Gestapo are one of the few archival collections documenting the fate of the Jews in the small ghettos north of Warsaw. The archive reveals how the secret police controlled the Jewish population during the final months before "evacuation" to the camps in 1942. The archive also shows that the Jews refused to acquiesce in the Nazi policy of extermination. After the ghettos were liquidated, survivors either fled to the forests or sought refuge among the overwhelmingly Polish rural population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The files of the Ciechanów (Zichenau) Gestapo – one of the few remaining archives of this kind from German-occupied Poland – offer interesting insights into the social policy of the Nazi state. The Germanisation of Polish territories occurred by deporting and exterminating the Jews, depriving Poles of their rights and supporting the local Germans and the ethnic Germans resettled from the East. The German minority living in this ethnically mixed region was required to adhere to strict codes of behaviour and was held accountable for all unauthorised contacts with their Polish and, even more so, their Jewish neighbours. The system of control and repression strove to isolate the various ethnic (‘racial’) groups, encouraging denunciations and thus instilling fear in the populace. This article pays particular attention to the actions of German citizens who fell under the scrutiny of the Secret Police. Les dossiers de la Gestapo de Ciechanów (Zichenau) sont une des rares archives de ce type à nous avoir été conservées pour la Pologne occupée, et offrent une perspective intéressante sur la politique sociale de l''Etat allemand. On y perçoit les tensions de la germanisation des territoires occupés, à la rencontre de la déportation et l''extermination des Juifs, de la privation de droits des Polonais, du soutien aux minorités allemandes locales et de l''installation de colons allemands en provenance de l''Est. La minorité allemande qui vécut dans cette région ethniquement hétérogène dut adhérer à des codes de comportements qui interdisaient les contacts avec les Polonais et les Juifs. Le système de contrôle et de répression, dans le climat de peur installé par une délation officialisée, s''efforça ainsi d''isoler les différents groupes. Cette contribution s''attarde sur les citoyens allemands qui furent l''objet de la surveillance de la police secrète. Die Akten der Gestapo des Bezirks Ciechanów (Zichenau) sind eine der wenigen Überlieferungen ihrer Art aus dem von deutsch besetzten Polen. Sie bieten einen besonderen Einblick in die Sozialpolitik des nationalsozialistischen Staates. Die Germanisierung des polnischen Gebiets wurde durch die Deportation und Ermordung der jüdischen Bevölkerung, die Entrechtung der polnischen Einwohner und durch die Unterstützung sowohl der einheimischen als auch der aus östlichen Gebieten umgesiedelten Deutschen erreicht. Die deutsche Minderheit in dieser ethnisch gemischten Region wurden angehalten, strenge Verhaltensregeln zu befolgen, und zugleich für alle nichterlaubten Kontakte mit ihren polnischen und jüdischen Nachbarn Polen zur Verantwortung gezogen. Das System von Kontrolle und Unterdrückung sollte die verschiedenen ethnischen Gruppen voneinander isolieren, es ermutigte Denunziationen und rief Furcht und Angst in der Bevölkerung hervor. Der Aufsatz lenkt das Augenmerk insbesondere auf das Verhalten der deutschen Einwohner, die von der Geheimpolizei beobachtet wurden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA), Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the Head Office of State Archives in Warsaw are working on a research project for the purpose of creating an up-to-date electronic guide to significant Polish archival collections in the U.S.A. and Canada. This electronic guide should help scholars and interested persons in locating special collections, libraries and archives through the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]