Similarly to the timing of the (re)new(ed) websites of archivists, the Day of Hungarian Archivists and Archives Days in the Republic of Slovakia go almost parallel. The event in Budapest took place yesterday, May 3, 2007, and the conference in Zilina, Slovakia is scheduled for May 23-25, 2007.

The core subject of both conventions is digitization in archives.

I was about to register for the Budapest event, but then decided that the morsels of info I could get from the speeches covering general issues from speakers at high levels of bureaucracy would probably not worth it. Of course I missed an opportunity to socialize.

The Zilina conference looks like more promising. Little is known (at least I don't know much) about the digitization efforts of archives in Slovakia. There are some presentations with the trash words "vision", "concept", "problem", "perspective" in their titles. Now these are the ones that I'd miss. Researchers aren't expecting concepts, we'd rather see some real stuff :-).

The presentations that I'd be interested in are these:
- digitization of medieval charters (Maretta)
- digitization of large format documents (Kasiarova, Kalnovicova)
- Badatelna - archival findings aids (Bily)
- Slovakian National Archives on the web (Vimmer)
- digitization in the Banska Bystrica archives (Horvathova, Latoova).

The Slovakian association invited panelists from abroad, too. There will be speakers from Austria (Styria), Germany (Baden-Württemberg), Budapest (Budapest City Archives), Poland (Poznan), Czech Rep. (Prague), Slovenia (Ptuj).