The 10th anniversary of the Hungarian Electronic Library

50. évfolyam, 2004. 4. szám

The 10th anniversary of the Hungarian Electronic Library

DRÓTOS László – MOLDOVÁN István

Könyvtári Figyelõ (Library Review), vol. 14. (50.) 2004. no. 4. pp. 801 – 805.
The Hungarian Electronic Library (Magyar Elektronikus Könyvtár – MEK, http://www.mek.oszk.hu) started ten years ago as a civil initiative and has been operating as a separate department of the National Széchényi Library for the last five years. The study summarises the ten-year development of the first Hungarian online text-archive and presents the long-term plans for a Hungarian electronic library network.

Collection development is supported from several sources. One significant source is those online and off-line electronic publications that are actually archived by the library. But more recently, many documents have been digitised by commercial companies or volunteers specifically for the Hungarian Electronic Library. Some authors and publishers even offer their documents in electronic format. As for its collection interest, the library aims to attract all kinds of user groups in various thematic fields. As a digital public library, it is building a representative collection that concentrates on core literature and documents.

The primary mission of the Hungarian Electronic Library is to offer free and uninterrupted access to its collection (currently 2114 works) available by any user in any part of the world. The system is based on open software. On the basis of the experiences of the operation of the Hungarian Electronic Library, a new digital document management system has been developed with support from the National Information Infrastructure Development (NIIF) Program. The system called eleMEK is a Java-based modular library sofware that can be used in Linux as well as Windows environment. The Hungarian Electronic Library offers a user-friendly searching interface with up to 10 search options and results can be viewed in various formats. The library has recently launched its version for the blind and visually impaired, using the “Világhalló” online reading system. The library offers a separate service called the Electronic Periodicals Archive and Database that collects and preserves Hungarian or Hungary-related digitised journal articles. Users visiting the library’s portal and wishing to browse beyond the content of the collection can find useful links to other services, such as the national online reference service called Libinfo and various useful library-related resources in the section called Világkönyvtár.

Thanks to the Open Archives Initiative protocol, the collection of the Hungarian Electronic Library is also available and can be retrieved via the search engine of the Hungarian National Digital Archives.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár
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