IHLIA's Open Up! project is about creating a collection of LGBTI movement history from Central and Eastern Europe, Cyprus, Malta and Turkey, and opening it up as far as possible to the LGBTI community and beyond.

Through digitising over 1,500 and almost 100,000 pages of magazines, newspapers, conference papers, campaign letters and other kinds of precious organisational documents, we hope to create a space that preserves this history, makes this history accessible, and also allows it to continually grow.

Our archive sources are currently ILGA, IGLYO, ILIS, Lesbian ConneXions and IHLIA’s archive of over 680 magazines from 14 different countries. If we are lucky, we will also be able to offer the same digitisation service to HOSI Wien and a number of LGBTI organisations in our countries of focus.

This is a new international project for IHLIA and we look forward very much to this rare opportunity of putting together a new digital collection and doing this in collaboration with as many LGBTI movements as possible. The end-product of the project, a web interface for accessing the collection, is expected to be launched at the international conference of the Archive, Library, Museum and Special Collections (ALMS) on ‘The Future of LGBTI Histories’ in August 2012.