48. évfolyam, 2002. 3. szám

Archívum

The article is a more elaborate version of a presentation prepared for the conference entitled The national bibliography from print to the digital age, held on the 75th anniversary of the Latvian national bibliography in Riga, 12-13 September 2002. It is related to the study in which the author compared the processing of periodical articles in the print version of the Latvian and Hungarian national bibliographies. It is not enough to compare the database versions (i.e. the Latvian Data Base of National Bibliography Analytic and the Hungarian IKER Repertory of Hungarian Periodicals), since in Hungary the national bibliography database and a number of databases developed from the bibliographies of various disciplines are responsible for covering periodical articles together. Beside applied disciplines (medicine, agriculture, technical sciences) not included in the national bibliography article database, there are databases in other social sciences (sociology, literary science, translation, national minorities, library science, education, law) as well. It is sated that from the point of view of the currentness of processing and the quantity of the material covered, the PRESSDOK database built by the Library of the Parliament can be compared with the Latvian database. The findings of Roger K. Summit and Péter Jacsó are used as the conceptual frames of the comparison.

In the case of the Latvian database processing material very soon, the limitations of the system used can be mentioned as a problem. In the case of Hungarian databases there are good information retrieval systems in CD-ROM databases as well as in Internet based databases, but in general the abundance of systems (many of which are difficult to use) can be confusing, and in many databases there is a great time lap between the publication date of the articles, and their inclusion in the database. Due to the great number of databases there are unavoidable overlaps, while there are fields (e.g. Hungarian literary pieces) which are not covered in any of them.

Erik Vajda in his study of 1994 outlines an imaginary article database built in cooperation (for which the Latvian solution can be an example) that seems to be more difficult to carry out that at the time of writing the article. The article is closed by mentioning some positive tendencies of the period that passed since the survey had been made in August, 2002.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Észrevételek