Hungary/ 4.2 Recent policy issues and debates  

4.2.8 New technologies and cultural policies

There is a special institution, The John von Neumann Digital Library and Multimedia Centre Public Company founded in 1997, whose mission is to co-ordinate digitisation in Hungarian culture. Its main projects are NDA and NAVA.

The National Digital Archive (NDA), established in 2003, provides uniform access to over 500 000 records produced by its 80 partner institutions (online journals, collections, archives, museums, etc.).

The National Audiovisual Archive (NAVA) was established in 2004. NAVA acts as the legal deposit archive for the public and commercial television and radio channels that broadcast all over the country. NAVA plays the same role for electronic programmes as the National Széchényi Library does for printed publications or as the Hungarian National Film Archive does for Hungarian films. The NAVA collection can be freely reached on-line from several hundred "NAVA points", terminals in libraries, schools, etc. registered within the framework regulated by law.

The Digital Literary Academy, run by the Petőfi Literature Museum, is a unique endeavour that keeps digitised oeuvres of contemporary writers who make their works available on the Internet by contract. Created in 1998, it had the works of 71 authors in 2009. In return, authors receive a monthly allowance four times the value of the official minimum wage.

MEK, the Hungarian Electronic Library, launched in 1994 on private initiative, stands out in international comparison with more than 7 500 items. Embedded into the National Széchényi Library, the project has maintained its community features (see also  chapter 9.2).

The on-going telematic development of the public library system has been another focus of attention and will receive significant additional resources from the EU Structural Funds over the next seven years (see  chapter 4.1).