The collection of exiled journalist and prominent human rights activist Ivana Tigridová, began to emerge in the 1970s, when Ivana Tigridova began focusing more intensively on human rights issues. November 1974 can be seen as year of the establishment of the collection, when Ivana and Pavel Tigrid founded the Help and Action organisation with Russian friends to support persecuted representatives of the cultural and political opposition in the Eastern bloc states. The scope of the collection has expanded considerably since January 1977, when, after the establishment of Charter 77, Ivana Tigridová, in Paris, initiated the creation of the International Committee for the Support of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, which helped the Charter 77 signatories in their efforts to enforce human and civil rights in the country. Ivana Tigridová has played a significant role in the management of these organisations and has documented and published everything concerning citizens who were prosecuted in Czechoslovakia, as of violation of Czechoslovak law and international human rights treaties. In 1977, Ivana Tigridova began publishing a bulletin on human rights and civil rights violations in eastern European countries, which served primarily to inform the Western public, media and other human rights organisations around the world. Pavel Tigrid and his wife were for their actions in favour of the Czechoslovak opposition under the constant supervision of the State Security. In particular, tens of agents were deployed on the Tigrids, who watched them in the Testimonies Publishing House at their home in Héricy near Paris.
During her fifteen years of work, Ivana Tigridová has made an incredible amount of work in the endless struggle for human rights and democracy. Its driving force was both the activities of dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe and, on the other, the support of Western human rights NGOs and exiles from the Eastern Bloc countries. Help and Action and the International Committee to Support Charter 77 ended with the fall of the Iron Curtain, which meant the defeat of totalitarian regimes in the Soviet bloc countries.
Ivana Tigridová donated her collection to the Czechoslovak Documentation Centre (ČSDS) when the Documentation Centre and its collections moved to the Czech Republic in 2000. In 2003, ČSDS concluded a gift agreement with the National Museum in Prague. CSDS Collections, including the Ivana Tigridová Collection, were handed over to the National Museum. The collection was institutionalised and partly made available to the scientific public.
