Hungarian museum collections and the degree of digitization
MúzeumCafé 32.
‘Google’ the word museum in Hungarian and you are led to actual museums or the museum.hu website. Using English, the definition of museum appears. This already reveals much about the place and evaluation of museums in Hungary and the ‘world’. If you want to obtain information about the degree to which museum collections are digitized in Europe and elsewhere overseas, the collection databases can be accessed from the sites of most museums. It may not be an exaggeration to say that in the 22 years since Hungary’s political changes – roughly the period when computers, the internet and digital cataloguing have developed and spread quickly – very little has happened in terms of digitizing museum collections. At most, it has taken place in an unorganised manner, with overlaps, expensively and with only a few results. What was achieved with cataloguing collections involving traditional publications and journals? There was plenty of time to do that – by and large the 210 years since public collections appeared in Hungary. Earlier publishing collection catalogues was self-evident. This somehow ceased when the present system of museums was established. Use of the internet might make you think all the above has changed. Yet it hasn’t. The computerised digitization of museum collections began in the past two decades, yet without a unified system and support. The severity of the time-lag is an issue demonstrated by the comments of a county museum director who referred to the most urgent IT tasks in 2009 in Museum Experts in the Service of Public Education. As he put it, it is as if nobody had done anything in a museum for 50-80 years in the paper-based world of public collections. Consequently, he believes, in effect the shortfall cannot be made up for.