The Archivum also functions as a teaching and research department of the Central European University and offers MA and PhD courses on the theories and methods of archives, evidence, human rights, documentary cinema, twentieth century history, and the politics of the Cold War.

The archive curates, preserves and makes accessible multilingual collections in over 40 languages spanning the period from World War II until the present, with a global geographical coverage but special focus on East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

From its inception, the Archivum has assisted in rescuing endangered collections, and plays a bridging role in making scattered documentary legacies of communities and supranational organizations researchable.

The original core of the Archivum’s holdings is the former archives of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, previously based in Munich and New York.

Other Cold War holdings include special collections on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 1956 Refugees, documents and sound-recordings on the activities of the UN Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary,[10] intelligence material gathered by former State Security agencies of the Eastern Bloc,[11] paranoia,[12][13] and Eastern European samizdat publications including underground materials from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

[16] The Archivum holds the personal papers of a number of prominent former opposition or exile figures, including General Béla Király, Gábor Demszky,[17] György Krassó, János Kis,[18] László Rajk, and Iván Pető, and the personal papers of international experts such as Alfréd Reisch and David S. Rohde.

[20] The Archivum’s holdings also include extensive collections of textual documents, documentaries and moving images of the transition after the fall of the Soviet regimes in Eastern Europe, and of the afterlife of Communism.

This exhibition contains almost 10.000 items (photos, videos, textual pages, audio materials) made by or connected to the year 1989, and Hungarian regime change.

It includes publications from and about Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as books and journals from Western countries about the history, culture, and politics of the region.

The Archivum is also the initiator of the annual celebration of 100-year-old buildings in the Hungarian capital, Budapest 100,[48][49] the amateur photo archive Fortepan,[50] and a co-initiator of the Diafilm virtual filmstrip museum.

In 2010, the Archivum ‘leaked’ thousands of previously classified documents from its holdings relating to the Cold War conflict on the Parallel Archive.