At the Expatriate Archive Centre researchers can find diaries and journals, letters and emails, articles and essays, photos and scrap books, blogs and websites, audio and video files, tickets and invitations, as well as other documents describing expatriate life dating back to the late 19th century. We define ‘expatriate’ as anyone who lives temporarily in a country other than their ‘home’ country. See full details and examples in our Collecting Policy and What We Collect section.
Our current collection contains more than 130 family archives in 18 different languages, representing 14 different nationalities and encompassing more than 120 countries, plus supplementary material including organisational archives and other documentation. With the introduction of our blog archiving project in 2019, these numbers are expected to grow.
The records are registered in AtoM, the collection management system that we use. It is a web-based, open-source application for standards-based archival description. To learn more about AtoM, please visit their website. We do our best to digitise the material we receive to better facilitate research.
Currently, the collection can be accessed only on the Expatriate Archive Centre premises. The privacy of our donors is of great importance to us; researchers are required to sign a researcher’s declaration before access can be granted.
To research with us, please complete the research request form on the Research page.