“Program archives and collections of adult education/continuing education provide researchers with primary research data so that program research, but also organisational and addressee research, can be carried out and that analyses of the development of offers and structures are possible. Overall, they provide access to research questions on the constellations of lifelong learning. At the same time, they provide insights into their own professional actions for representatives of the profession. On the one hand, existing program archives and collections are increasingly confronted with processes of digitization. On the other hand, questions of indexing and metadata are continuously arising for a compatible archiving and collection process. Program archives and collections are historical, contemporary, and future expressions of the adult and continuing education landscape.” (Gieseke et al. 2018, p. 451)

In German-speaking countries, there are three institutions that collect programs from adult education providers. In addition, further education programs may obviously be found in city archives and the archives of other organisations. The admission criterion for this list is the explicit identification of the collection and archiving of programs as a key task of the entire archive or as a significant sub-task.

In some other countries, systematic collections of adult education programs also exist. One example is the program archive at Linköping University in Sweden, which collects programs from Swedish Folkhögskola (institutions of lifelong learning in the sense of popular education, roughly comparable to adult education centres) starting in 1952.

On this page, you will find further information about the three German-language archives.