Established in 1984, the Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU) is the single, official repository for the historical documents of the institutions, bodies and agencies of the European Union. It preserves and makes available, under the 30-year access rule, the archival documents of EU institutions for research purposes. It also holds more than 160 private collections of European personalities, key politicians, movements and associations.
The state-of-the-art archival vaults, located beneath Villa Salviati in Florence, Italy, hold approximately 11,000 linear meters of documents. Nearly 950,000 items are described in the online database, including around 700,000 files, more than 950 oral history interviews, 71,500 photographs, and more than 8200 audio recordings, 1350 video recordings, and approximately 207,000 digitalised files.
The HAEU is part of the European University Institute (EUI) and provides modern research facilities. It co-directs, with the EUI’s Department of History, the Alcide De Gasperi Centre for Research on European Integration. The Archives’ five grant programmes support postgraduate research on European integration, and each year around 150 academics come to our facilities to consult our collections on site, while hundreds of thousands of visits are made to our archival database. A multi-lingual team of professional archivists assists users in consulting the collections. Finally, as part of its outreach activities, the HAEU runs a highly-subscribed education programme with laboratories developed for students from kindergarten to university.
The Director of the Archives is Dr Dieter Schlenker.
