51. évfolyam, 2005. 2. szám

Archívum

The MOKKA-R project: the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue of Early Books

HEGYI Ádám

Könyvtári Figyelő (Library Review) vol. 15. (51.) 2005. no. 2. pp. 257 – 267.

Similarly to the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue project, plans for a special cataloguing project on early books started in autumn 2003. As a first step, a survey was conducted to find out about the early book collections (books printed before 1850) at Hungarian libraries and their state of cataloguing. According to the results, nearly 900,000 items were identified in more than 200 collections. 90% of these documents are concentrated in the holdings of 20 important libraries.

The new database will function as a common catalogue of Hungarian early book collections but will also serve as a national catalogue of the locations of these documents. Documents of the same edition will be searchable individually and in addition to the location, individual features of the volumes will appear as well.

The documents printed in the Carpathian basin before 1850 are part of a common cultural heritage. Thus the cooperation between libraries needs to go beyond national borders and involve historical collections in neighbouring countries too. The main problems lie in the different level of cataloguing between the libraries to be included, as well as in the differences in respect of technical equipment, hardware and software used by individual libraries.

The catalogue uses the UNICODE character set, the cataloguing follows the practice of Szeged University Library and the National Széchényi Library. The system is able to export data in USMARC, HUNMARC and XML. The most important part of the database is the searchable catalogue. The database is hosted on the server of Szeged University Library. The initial developments have been completed and 6 library catalogues have already been uploaded. On the other hand, the cooperation between the partner institutions is progressing at a slow pace. The collections of Hungary-related early books held in other countries will be included at a later stage of the project, but the developers expect further difficulties due to the different level of technical readiness of the participating institutions.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Észrevételek