The policy of liberalisation (perestroika), which was started in Lithuania at the end of the 1980s, also influenced the activities of archives. Various state archives started to open their collections, not only to scholars and historians, but also to students and the general public. The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences was one of the first to make its archive public. In 1989, the Ignas Jonynas collection also became public. As a result, not only members of the Academy had an opportunity to use the collection, but also students and those who were interested in Lithuanian history. This was important, because the Jonynas collection holds documents from different periods of Lithuanian history. Documents that characterise the political history of the independent Republic of Lithuania, and also documents which illustrate the dangerous and often dramatic situation of Lithuanian intellectuals during the Stalinist period, were of special importance to the general public and researchers. These documents were unknown to the general population.