Facility information:
The National Committee of Americans of Polish Descent had numerous offices and outposts throughout New York State and beyond. The main goals of the organisation included: participation of Americans of Polish descent in the US war effort, defence and preservation of the sovereignty and inviolability of the Polish state, training of Americans of Polish descent to participate in the rebuilding of Poland and Europe, making the American public aware of the historical role of the Polish state, developing plans and projects to help Poland after the war. The KNAPP milieu spoke out against the Polish Government in Exile - represented by Prime Ministers Władysław Sikorski and Stanisław Mikołajczyk - in terms of its policy towards the USSR and its naivety towards the policy of the Western Allies.

The KNAPP's main achievement was to bring about the consolidation of Polish émigré circles in the USA and, consequently, the formation of the Polish American Congress. Its delegates also participated in the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945. The KNAPP milieu established the Józef Piłsudski Institute in America, and after the end of the war conducted scientific, publishing and educational activities. KNAPP was dissolved in 1959 and its collection has not been compiled to date.

Completed works:
The aim of the task was to digitise and make publicly available the archival collection of the National Committee of Americans of Polish Origin (KNAPP), a Piłsudskiite organisation in the United States based in New York. The Committee was active between 1942 and 1959. The collection consists of 290 archival units and includes documentation produced between 1942 and 1965. At least 1250 pages from this valuable archive were digitised as part of the task.

The digitisation process used, among other things, the practices of the Metropolitan New York Library. It included: scanning the pages at high resolution, creating digital originals; extracting the units (documents) and collecting metadata about them, with a focus on people, places and dates; processing and preparing the data for publication on the website; quality control, supervision of the process and staff, care of the software and hardware.

Funding: Programme of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage "Protection of Cultural Heritage Abroad".

More about the project: https://polonika.pl/

• Fundacja na rzecz Dziedzictwa Narodowego imienia Józefa Piłsudskiego, realizacja w roku 2021.