10 years of the Hungarian National Digital Archive (MaNDA)
The Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute, the legal predecessor of Forum Hungaricum Nonprofit Ltd., established the Hungarian National Digital Archive in 2013. The aggregator database was presented for the first time on 23 March 2013 by Lajos Lovas, the then Director General of the Hungarian National Digital Library, at the opening of the exhibition "Üdvözlet a Balatonról" at the Balaton Museum.
The MaNDA database, created by Forum Hungaricum, is unique in its content, which makes national cultural treasures that are often invisible to visitors accessible and reusable. Finds and artefacts retrieved from the storerooms of public institutions and the cellars of private collectors are made available and accessible through digitisation. In 2016, the interface of our database was renewed.
In addition to searching and browsing digitised cultural content, the Digital Archive Development Department also creates regular thematic virtual exhibitions using items uploaded by our partner institutions. The aim of the exhibitions is to present and promote the cultural content uploaded to the database in a new perspective, so that items that are separated by their spatial, legal or formal characteristics and might never be placed in the same exhibition space can be displayed together in the digital space. At the launch of the renewed portal, three virtual exhibitions were available: the Fabulous picture postcards , the Bathing Culture és the Virtual tour - in both English and Hungarian - and today the number of these exhibitions exceeds 300.
Our cultural database collects and publishes digitised content uploaded by public collections and partner institutions in the field of public culture on the European Digital Library: Europeana.
Forum Hungaricum has a dedicated national section aggregator role through the Public Collection Digitization Strategy. It covers other cultural institutions, with a special focus on ecclesiastical institutions.
Forum Hungaricum also contributes to making Hungarian national cultural treasures accessible and re-usable through Europeana, thus enabling Hungary to add a wealth of new data and digital documents to the European Union's electronic library. According to a report published by earlier this year, Hungary has so far published 1,017,249 quality records on Europeana, almost half of which have been aggregated by Forum Hungaricum.
As an uniqe gift, we present you to the 10 years - 10 images colouring booklet 10 év – 10 kép, made from the materials of our database.
Translated by László Gönczi