46. évfolyam, 2000. 4. szám

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The article surveys the main periods of local history activities in Hungary. In the 18th century knowledge of the dwelling place was already a part of primary education. Studies about the native land and the dwelling place remained curriculum requirements. The development of the bourgeois has given great impetus to local history research, and to the conscious gathering of documents of local interest. The collected documents were stored in the library departments of museums or in archives. The first special collection of local studies was established in Budapest, at the Metropolitan Library. It was them who introduced the collection of press clippings. After the Trianon treaty (1920) increased political attention was focused on the remaining and lost parts of the country, and local history/local study researches and bibliographic activities were also subsidised by the state. Systematic collection development characterised only one or two town libraries, the university library of Pécs, and Gyõr besides the Budapest Collection. The school system kept on motivating the search for local values in schools. Where town libraries did not assume these tasks, school and secondary school libraries played this role. In World War II. the majority of the collections have been destroyed, and the new schools did not consider collection their duty. The new period started in the fifties. The Budapest Collection, having become a department of the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, became the methodological centre of this field, aiding the development of the local history work of other libraries. In the sixties the local study movement had its revival, local history writing had got more vivid, and county libraries were compelled to follow local study work upon a departmental decree. Bibliographies were compiled, methodological guidelines were issued, annual meetings were organised in the field of local history dealing with theoretical issues of collection development, processing, bibliographic work, databank compilation, etc. The enthusiasm in local studies decreased in the eighties, and the work started to develop again only in the new circumstances brought about in the 1990s. In 1994 the organisation of local history librarians was established within the Association of Hungarian Librarians in order to join those involved in this work. The cultural law of 1997 has reinforced that the collection of local history information and documents belongs to the basic tasks of county libraries.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Észrevételek (2001/03/19)