Digitisation projects and preserving digital documents in Hungary Current trends in digitisation DELOS, Turin, 3-4. febr István Moldován Hungary, OSZK, MEK Department

Review Networks in Hungary Digitisations projects Digital preservation An example: The Hungarian Electronic Library Summary

Networks in Hungarian libraries Start of Information Infrastructure Development Program - NIIF First network services; , mailing list, OPACs, filetransfer - X HBONE - Hungarian TCP/IP backbone Sulinet - Internet in secondary schools 1990s library automatizations, OPACs, databases, shared catalogue system

Hungarian Internet Backbone

MOKKA The Hungarian National Shared Catalogue

Digitisation projects in Hungary and in the National Library Current situation: A few big state-funded digitisation and some smaller in public libraries Bibliotheca Corviniana Digitalis project in OSZK Digital Academy of Literature by Ministry Arcanum databases in a private company

Bibliotheca Corviniana Digitalis project All old manuscripts of Mathias Rex - Corvinas of OSZK- digitised with the equipment Xerox (35 issue) Technology: TIFF and JPEG images with XML datafiles, browsing Partly on the Internet and the whole collections on DVD European project plan to digitise all Corvinas around Europe

Corvinas on the Internet

Digital Academy of Literature Aim: digitisation of every work of 61 contemporary Hungarian authors, only in Hungarian - supported by Cultural Ministry Works, bibliographies and biographies on the Net free access Sponsorship of authors as copyright fee Technology: SGML - HTML

Digital Academy of Literature

Arcanum databases One of the largest digitisation company in the field of Hungarian heritage commercial CD-ROM product, Internet free Large textbased databases Classical literature, reference works, bibliographic databases Technology: Folio - like SGML

Arcanum databases

Digital preservation UNESCO Resolution on Digital Preservation: “The world’s cultural, educational, scientific, public and administrative resources... are increasingly produced, distributed and accessed only in digital form.... Digital information is highly susceptible to technical obsolescence and physical decay and maintaining ongoing access to digital resources requires long-term commitment.”

Digitisation and preserving Digital archiving as much important as digitisation! fast changes on the Internet off-line media types become obsolete publishers don’t archive the electronic versions etc. paper documents => many digitisation projects original electronic documents => only a few digital archiving projects

One possible approach The Hungarian Electronic Library 1994 launched the Hungarian Electronic Library (abbr. in Hungarian: MEK) supported by NIIF The main goal was: to collect, preserve and provide the Hungarian and Hungary-related electronic documents that are freely available for scientific, educational or culture-related activities.

Original MEK Gopher

Original MEK1 Web

MEK VRML

The Hungarian Electronic Library The organization: : civil, volunteer initiative, then an association : as a department of the National Library Staff: 5 full time employee, 7 out outside co- worker and many volunteer Tools: Gopher, FTP, HTTP, (VRML), database (MySQL)

The main aquisition resources Web homepages; Directly from authors; Directly from universities, scientific institutions; Publishers; CD-ROMs; Volunteers;

Main part of collection Reference books; Classical and contemporary Hungarian literature; Scientific literature; Documents from Hungarian authors living abroad; Hungarian literature in foreign-languages;

Size of collection More than documents with metadata approx. 2,5 Gigabyte Mostly in HTML, PDF, WinWord, RTF, a few TeX, JPG, GIF, LIT format

Usage Average visitors per day Average hits per day Actualy visitors come from countries Main user groups: students, school- children, Hungarian from abroad

Statistics

Plans for the future I. MEK a new digital library system From March Using standard metadata: MARC, XML, Dublin Core Z39.50 server support Standard document identification : URN OAI supported - shared system

New MEK2 Web

Cover page of a MEK document

Plans for the future II. Collecting free online Hungarian electronic journals - Electronic Periodical Archive XML conversion and searchable bibliographies Alternative interface for blind people Collecting sound documents in MP3 Online text to speech conversion the MEK documents Shared digital library system based on OAI

Summary The task of collecting, processing and providing various types of electronic documents can be undertaken effectively only by national libraries. Need of selection, quality control and post- processing of these documents. Long time preservation and the easy availability of the documents are also equally important. I hope, we all will be able to cope with this challenge, and the libraries will be with us in the end of this century too - even in electronic form.

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