The project "Bibliotheca Eruditionum 15001700"

OSZK

1.1 Aims of the project

The "Bibliotheca Eruditionum" project was intended to create a digitized old Hungarian library. The project's primary aim is to modernize and upgrade digital library services in three significant areas:

within the frame of a Hungarian and international co-operation a vast cultural history reconstruction could be achieved; moreover, this would be a pilot network-based application in order to represent scientific databases in a format useable both for scholars and high school students;
searches of SQL and SGML databases would result in generated graphic images whenever possible (map imaging, etc). The entire project would be supplemented with quality digital facsimiles and archival sources as well as the books themselves;
with the help of virtual reality technology, former libraries that are currently defunct or imaginary libraries could be recreated that would provide services similar to traditional libraries.

The implementation of the aforementioned goals present numerous difficulties in digital library planning. All findings and outcomes of the project may concern the future of libraries, services and reference work. The project fits into the mainstream of international trends and corresponds with the European Union standards. Science areas that are still poorly automated may follow the path we intend to represent in the project.

1.2 The subject of the project and the topic chosen

The retrospective national bibliography has been building in the Hungarian National Library for several decades. The outcome of the work has earned international acclaim since not only bibliographic processing but recording the history of each edition is accomplished. We keep an inventory on copy data aswell.

The School of Hungarian Literature History, within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Szeged, together with the central library of the University and the Institute of History of European Civilisation organized a joint research that has been going on for two decades now. The research aims at uncovering the reading habits of the population of the Carpathian basin in the 16-17 century. In the project's initial phase we seeked for all the sources among previously published studies and visited archives of former territories of Hungary that may contain information on habits of book collecting. The findings are continously published in a beautiful series.

As a result of this research program a new database system is created in order to study history of Hungarian civilisation in the 16-17 century. Databases contain findings of basic researches characterized by a quantity approach. This approach is seldom applied in similar researches. Moreover, the multimedia display of the significant portion of the corpus is exceptional (books, bindings, illustrations).

Once the work is done, databases would explain questions such as what kind of books were read and collected by whom and when in the Carpathian basin in the 16-17 century. The system could provide links to the most important archival sources, and illustrations of the most significant volumes could be displayed too. The databases could be extremely useful in interdiscplinary sciences. Finally, we would be able to understand how European international trends spread throughout the Carpathian basin in the two-hundred-year period following the Reformation.