The Hungarian National Archives website has just announced the results of a tender competition for the digitization of old maps and pre-1526 charters in its holdings. The competition started in January earlier this year. My "educated guess" for the outcome was that Arcanum would be commissioned for that job.

The results don't match my expectations. GDL has been named as the winner of the competition. A had some faint memories about this company, who are not really known to the public. Now after doing some digging they turned out to be a past winner of an other National Archives competition, that time for the computer filing system of the archives. They have worked for the Archives of National Security Services in the late 1900s, early 2000s (this archives was called the Historical Office those years).

Obviously this isn't good news for Arcanum. Thanks to the post by one of our list fellows on the Csaladtortenet mailing list, we could read about the Arcanum plans for 2007. Their plans included further volumes of the county nobility series by Márton Szluha, maps from the family archives in the holdings of the Hungarian National Archives, manuscript maps, and especially land ownership maps from the Hungarian National Széchényi Library, old cadastral maps from Hungary's counties and "further charters".

One of the two subjects of the May 3, 2007 Day of Hungarian archivists will be the possibilities of digitization of the archives' holdings in Hungary. I could image that GDL would be one of the guests/speakers at this event.