One hundred public collections, one aim: building a data base of Hungarian cultural heritage – the role of MaNDA

MúzeumCafé 47.

The Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute (MaNDA), although based on a past of several decades, is relatively new in terms of Hungarian public collections. It was established by the government in 2011 on the basis of the Hungarian National Film Archive with a view of providing a common interface for digitization of the different elements of Hungarian cultural treasures. At the same time the new organisation was to continue the traditional functions of the Film Archive, namely preserving the stock of films and related items, such as its 26,000 posters.

MaNDA, which was based on the standards of the EU digital library, has established its own, cloud-based data bank. This primarily relates to museums, libraries and archives – as well as to itself as an audiovisual archive – but other cultural entities such as educational institutes, ecclesiastical bodies, community cultural centres and civil organisations also have access. The aim is to give an insight in the collections of large national institutes, small private collections and the cultural materials held by major organisations of local communities. Texts, images, sound, audio-visual materials and 3D models are all included. The uploading institute determines the access to digitized files. It decides whether a visitor can download material simply on request – which MaNDA regards as the best policy – or whether only registered users can open a file, restricting downloading to special terminals at so-called MaNDA Points. The MaNDA data base (mandadb.hu, though under development at the time of writing), currently holds more than 190,000 records and has millions of meta data.