Digital Library Initiatives in Hungary - The Brief History of the Hungarian Electronic Library

This is a presentation about digital libraries in Hungary in a conference in Washington D.C. at 2000

1. Digital Library Initiatives in Hungary
The Brief History of the Hungarian Electronic
Library
István Moldován
National Széchényi Library
[email protected]

2. 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)

3. 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.

4. •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

5. John von Neumann Digital Library

6. Digital Academy of Literature

7. Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County
Electronic Library

8. Pázmány Péter Electronic Library

9. Corvinus Library - Hungarian
history

10. 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".

11. The Hungarian Electronic Library

12. The sources of the acquisition
•Web homepages
•from authors
•publishers
•volunteers

13. 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

14. 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"

15. 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;

16. 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

17. MIT-HOL
(Hungarian Online Librarian)

18. 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

19. MEK Statistics I.

20. MEK Statistics II.

21. Copyright problems
•Complicated situation
•New copyright law since September 1999.
•Library or Publisher
•Publishing or broadcasting

22. 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

23. Thank you for your attention!
•Please visit our Electronic Library
•URL: HTTP://WWW.MEK.IIF.HU