Digital Archiving in the Hungarian Széchényi Library
The story and the plans of the Hungarian Electronic Library
Rome, 21. Oct. 2002.István Moldován
OSZK, MEK Department
Review
• Digital preservation
• Digitisation and archiving
• Different approaches in the world
• One alternative : the Hungarian Electronic Library
• Summary
Digital preservation
UNESCO Resolution on Digital Preservation:
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_archives/analysis_131101.shtml
“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 archiving
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
Possible approaches in the world
• Denmark: Netarchive http://netarchive.dk
• United States: The Internet Archivehttp://www.archive.org
• Sweden: Kulturarw3http://www.kb.se/kw3/ENG/Default.htm
One possible approach:The Hungarian Electronic Library
• abbreviated in Hungarian: MEK
• launched in 1994
• supported by the Information Infrastructure Development Project (IIF)
http://mek.iif.hu
The main goal: “to collect and organise Hungarian and Hungary-related electronic documents that are freely available for scientific, educational or culture-related activities.”
The organisation
• 1994-1999 : Civil initiative and later a non-profit association with volunteers
• Since 1999 : A department of the Hungarian National Library
• Staff: 5 full time employees, 7-8 co-workers, and still many volunteers
Acquisition sources
• from Web-sites
• from CD-ROMs
• directly from authors
• directly from institutions
• directly from publishers
• from volunteers
Content
• reference books; lexicons, bibliographies, dictionaries
• classical and contemporary Hungarian literature (novels, poems, short stories)
• scientific literature (articles, books, conference or research papers)
• Hungarian literature in foreign languages• maps, music scores ...
Size
• more than 4.500 documents with metadata
• total size of the files is about 2,5 Gigabyte
• formats: plain text, HTML, PDF, Word, RTF, TeX, PostScript, LIT e-book, JPEG
As of October 2002:
Usage
• about 4.500 visitors a day
• more than 100.000 hits per day
• visitors from 95-100 countries
• main user groups: students, teachers, parents, blind people, Hungarians living in foreign countries
Copyright
• new copyright law since 1999
• on-line publication is similar to television or radio broadcasting
• Hungarian Bureau for the Protection of Authors’ Rights (ARTISJUS)
• generic permission for novels, short stories and poetry
• individual permissions for scientific literature
The process of aquisition
InternetWebsite
E-mail, FTP
FloppyCD-ROM
printed document
Copyrightpermission
Quality control
Format conversion„ISO 8859-2 and Unicode”
Cataloguing, metadataother information
Upload to MEK
Downloading
A new document type: the Electronic Periodical Archive
http://epa.oszk.hu
• A collection of the URL addresses
• Selective archive of journal issues
• Full-text archive of selected journal articles
• scientific journals• cultural journals• magazines• newspapers• newsletters (some of
them published in foreign countries)
A 3-level service: Types of e-periodicals:
Plans for the future
• integrated digital library system
• open standards and free software
• Dublin Core metadata
• data exchange in MARC format
• Z39.50 support
• Open Archive Initiative compatibility
• persistent URN addresses
• interface and text to speech conversion for blind people
• chat forums for the readers ...
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.