The Hungarian National Digital Archive was established

The Hungarian National Digital Archive (MaNDA) has been established, the most important task of which will be to record all the works of the Hungarian cultural treasure in digital form.

The Parliament approved the amendments to the Film Act and the Museum Act on Monday, so that the MaNDA, the full name of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute, could be established with the transformation of the Hungarian National Film Archive, Géza Szőcs announced in Budapest on Monday.

The state secretary responsible for culture of the National Ministry of Resources (NEFMI) emphasized that the digital revolution taking place today is of similar importance to previous communication paradigm shifts: the development of languages, the spread of writing or the spread of printing. "We are facing a big challenge to prevent the changes, follow them or break away," he pointed out.

Géza Szőcs emphasized that in recent years Hungarian public collections have digitized a significant amount of cultural content with state support, but most of the documents are currently inaccessible to the general public, in closed systems, which are mostly incompatible with each other.

MaNDA's role will therefore be to make this content available, store and digitize newly created or unrecorded works through a rich and entertaining central interface, he listed. According to the Secretary of State's report, access will be free of charge for works not subject to royalties, and online content will be available for other content.

It will be an important task to add as much Hungarian content as possible to the common European cultural database, Europeana, as only 14 thousandths of the 9 million documents currently there are Hungarian, Géza Szőcs said.

As Lajos Lovas, Head of the Digital Archives Department of NEFMI, who heads MaNDÁ as Ministerial Commissioner until the announcement of the Director General's competition, said that a beta version of the central Internet interface will be completed in the second half of 2011.

According to him, the first step of the MaNDA project is to create a national digital cadastre, followed by the development of an intelligent metadata search engine that will be able to search various databases and display the results in a central interface. In the future, MaNDA will also act as a methodological center, thus creating uniform standards for digitization.

Source: MTI