Digital Library Initiatives in Hungary

The Brief History of the Hungarian Electronic Library

István Moldován

National Széchényi Library

moldovan@oszk.hu

The history and current situation of the networking in Hungary I.

• 1987. launched the National Information Infrastructure Development Program

• 1989. The first services have begun on the basis of the X.25 protocol

• 1990. a large IIF project started, called HBONE (Hungarian Backbone)

The history and current situation of the networking in Hungary II.

• 1993. the first national and the international Internet connection

• 1995-96. appeared the first commercial Internet provider services (IPS)

• 1997. the SULINET - a governmental project to connect all the Hungarian secondary schools to the Internet.

• John von Neumann Digital Library

• Digital Academy of Literature

• Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Electronic Library

• Pázmány Péter Electronic Library

• Corvinus Library - Hungarian history

Some Hungarian digital library initiatives

John von Neumann Digital Library

Digital Academy of Literature

Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County Electronic Library

Pázmány Péter Electronic Library

Corvinus Library - Hungarian history

The Hungarian Electronic Library

• "Electronic publishing" becomes more popular in Hungary

• 1994. The beginning the Hungarian Electronic Library (abbr. MEK)

• It's goal is to make these electronic documents available by collecting, organizing and transforming them to a uniform format using "human labor".

The Hungarian Electronic Library

The sources of the acquisition

• Web homepages

• from authors

• publishers

• volunteers

The formats

• The difficulties in the Internet publishing

• Different formats and accentes

• Reading and preservation

• ”Supported" and "permitted" document formats in the MEK

• ”Supported": ASCII, HTML, TeX

• ”Permitted”: DOC, RTF, PDF

• PKZIP for compressing

Description, navigation

• A simple bibliographic description in a little ASCII file, so called "MEK header file”

• Searching on the basis "MEK header file" by title, authors and keywords

• A simple hierarchical system of menus "electronic bookshelves”

• "New acquisitions"

Virtual library

• We are collecting the URLs:

• of the other Hungarian e-text archives

• of the Hungarian related mailing lists

• of the Internet services of the Hungarian libraries, e.g. online catalogues,

• of the Hungarian electronic journals and newspapers;

Online reference – Ask a Librarian

• Documents to Assistance

• MIT-HOL (Hungarian Online Librarian) Since September 1999.

• 20-30 librarians from different libraries and with different expertise

• archive of all questions and answers

MIT-HOL (Hungarian Online Librarian)

Internet usage

• 3.300 electronic documents

• monthly– users from 24.000 different IP addresses– download more than 1 million files– in size 26-28 gigabytes

• students from from Hungarian universities and highschools

MEK Statistics I.

MEK Statistics II.

Copyright problems

• Complicated situation

• New copyright law since September 1999.

• Library or Publisher

• Publishing or broadcasting

Plans for the future

• to gain and draw into this job more libraries, university departments, other institutions

• make closer relations to publishers and universities

• improve the bibliographic description of our documents

• to compile lists about the most important books in different subjects and sciences

• to begin archiving Hungarian electronic journals with the help of the National Library

Thank you for your attention!

• Please visit our Electronic Library

• URL: HTTP://WWW.MEK.IIF.HU