News archive

VEMU Estonian Museum Canada received many guests at the end of the summer. Kadri Vissel and Tiina Tael from the Estonian National Museum visited us. Kadri continued working with the VEMU artefact collection, in which over 2000 items have been registered to date. Tiina perused Tommy Tomson’s extensive negative collection and chose suitable frames for archiving. The project was supported by the Ministry of Education and Research, under the Estonian Diaspora Action Plan.

It has become a tradition for the National Library of Lithuania to welcome the Lithuanian language and culture teachers working in Lithuanian schools and Baltic Studies Centers abroad. This summer, two groups visited the Library.

On August 7, a small group of lecturers teaching at the Baltic Studies Centers in the United Kingdom, USA, Japan, Latvia and other countries visited the Library. Services Department of the National Library of Lithuania, and Viktorija Bulyginaitė, a staff member of the Department of Children and Youth Literature, gave a tour of the library. The visitors also had the opportunity to visit the exhibitions that have been currently taking place.

On July 23rd, the long-term cooperation between VEMU and the Estonian Literary Museum was officially documented in a collaborative agreement In Tartu. The goal of the agreement is to increase the effectiveness of and diversity of preservation, collection, research, accessibility, and publicize the cultural heritage of Estonians in the homeland and abroad.

On July 11, teachers working in Lithuanian schools abroad visited the Library. This year, the teachers came from Ireland, Belgium, Brazil, Greece, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Norway and Ukraine.

The new National Library of Lithuania exhibition, which opened on June 26, 2024, tells about the great flight that took place in the summer of 1944. At the end of WWII, as the German-Soviet war front approached from the east, the inhabitants of the Baltic States, Eastern and Central European countries moved en masse to the West. Nobody knew that they would not return.

The 7th Baltic Cultural Heritage Abroad conference titled “Eighty Years After 1944: Then and Now” took place in Vilnius from June 26-28th, 2024. Organized by the National Library of Latvia, Not-For-Profit organization Baltic Heritage Network and a whole slew of partner institutions, the meeting was dedicated to the Great Escape of 1944, as well as its effects on global Baltic diaspora communities and on the three Baltic States during the Soviet occupation as well as following their re-independence.

During the conference “Eighty Years After 1944: Then and Now” in Vilnius, NFP BaltHerNet’s annual general meeting was also held on June 27th. The idea for the creation of the organization came about in 2006 in Tartu at a conference dedicated to the cultural heritage of the Baltic diaspora, held at the Estonian Literary Museum. The organization was established in 2008. The contacts made and developed through the network have led to many different projects and ventures, which have all helped to preserve, further research, and introduce the history of the Baltic diaspora.

The summer edition of the Baltic Heritage Network quarterly newsletter is now available. In these pages, you will find information about our past and future events, new publications, and what is happening across the globe within the diaspora research and archive communities.

Baltic Heritage Network annual general meeting will take place on Thursday, June 27th, 2024 at 08.30-10.00 at at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania (Conference Hall 5th Floor), Vilnius.