I'm just back from the closing day of the DAT 2003 conference held in Budapest. I visited the section covering digitization in libraries.

I could grab a few URLs for relatively new initiatives already in work and was informed about some projects still in progress.

The Vasi Digitális Könyvtár is a searchable corpus of various publications that relate to Vas County of Hungary. A less sophisticated (clumsy?) service is the Somogyi Elektronikus Könyvtár. This latter library has scanned pages of local history publications.

The librarians of the Szabó Ervin City Library in Budapest mentioned the opening of their new website early next year with new databases added. These will include at least 4000 pictures from the Photo Collection of their Budapest Collection, the local history collection for Budapest.

They took part in adding two more resources to the online collection of Arcanum: András Vályi's Magyar Országnak leírása (Description of Hungary) and Elek Fényes-es Magyarország geographiai szótára (Geographical dictionary of Hungary). Arcanum / Gesta, then click on "Régi magyar földrajz". Both of these contain basic information about settlements in Hungary. Vályi's work is from the late 1700s and it has shorter entries. Fényes tends to be more detailed. He is from the mid-1800s.

Péter Király of Arcanum was amongst the speakers of the conference. After his lecture I had the chance to speak to him. It looks like it is pretty unlikely that another volume of the Budapest city directories could be searchable anytime soon. Oops, I just realize I forgot to mention its URL in the post of 3 December.

He could confirm the Arcanum considered the removal of the freely available Nagy Iván and Kempelen from their website.

I've been waiting for the U&C database for quite some time now. U&C stands for Urbaria et Conscriptiones. This archival collection is part of the Archives of the Hungarian Chamber (ministry of finance, basically) that can be found in the Hungarian National Archives. The collection has tax lists and inventaries of domains in the management of the chamber between the 16th and 19th centuries. The database will not have all those names mentioned in the tax lists, but it will have plenty of useful information. E. g. it will be possible to see what lists are available for a certain domain. The U&C CD will be published by Arcanum, however, as it is a work by the Hungarian National Archives staff, there will be free internet access to it, too.