The Mediakit for advertisers to be shown in Family Tree Magazine includes their thematic plan for each of the upcoming issues in a year or so. According to this guide the August-September 2008 issue (available mid-July 2008) should have an article covering Hungarian roots.

Continuing from the previous entry.

Digitized 1819-1833 map sheets of the River Danube from Devin near Bratislava - Pozsony down to Novi Sad are now available online on the Duna-Mappáció site, thanks to the joint efforts of the Ethnography Dept of the Univ of Pécs and the Hungarian National Archives. There is also a DVD that can be ordered for about 50 US$ from the publisher.

To see the sheets Internet Explorer is needed, and also an ActiveX control, Autodesk's MapGuide. No luck for FireFox, Safari etc. users.

With the proper setup one can navigate between the sheets either using the icons on the screen (zoom, pan) or use the list and descriptions of the sheets' contents.

Timed to the annual Budapest Book Festival - and as expected for this year - Arcanum came out with the DVDs of the maps of the 3rd Military Survey. They now offer DVDs with two series of the originals: 752 sheets of the 1:75,000 scale series, and 1333 sheets of the 1:25,000 scale series are both available for purchase. The 1:25,000 one covers historical Hungary (Transylvania and Croatia included), while the DVD cover of the 1:75,000 series suggests that it has the maps for Bosnia, as well. (sample of the 1:25,000, sample of the 1:75,000) Both versions are georeferenced.

The DVDs are not cheap. List price of the 1:75,000 is about 200 US$, that of the 1:25,000 is about 330 US$. However, Arcanum does offer discounts at special events, periods or they throw in some free stuff every now and then.

Anyway, there is a shift in their target market. Their relatively cheap (when compared to contents) genealogy and local history publications have been popular with genealogists and other individuals. I can't imagine the situation, though, that someone interested in 4-5 places would buy the map DVD for $200. So, Arcanum is probably selling them to institutions like libraries, agencies and authorities. A couple of years ago I approached Arcanum SEO, Mr. Biszak, letting him know about my interest to licence Arcanum materials to be provided to RadixIndex subscribers. He didn't believed in the profitability of the online service, some way, though, they launched Arcanum Online. Using this service all the textual publications of Arcanum was available for individuals for a monthly fee of about 25 US$. I can't find it on their website now, it seems to be gone (remodelling?).

The other novelty at Arcanum these days is the box with two double-layer DVDs containing the digitized manuscript maps of the National Széchényi Library. Some 3000 maps can be found in the 16 GB capacity of the DVDs. Maps of the Danube and Tisza rivers are not on the DVD, because they are to be published separately. And the next blog entry will reveal the mapping of Danube. Stay tuned.

Flashback to the summer of 2005. In June I received an email from the editor of the renowned Family Tree Magazine saying that my Radix - Genealogy research in Hungary site is to be named as one of their 101 best undiscovered family history website. Wow! Pleased to be listed there, as one can expect. The selection came out in the August issue of Family Tree Magazine.

Today my mailbox had the Arcanum Newsletter #23 inside. Not without news! On July 1, 2005 they are going to come up with a new look of their website, and what is more exciting, they plan to launch a new service, Arcanum Online. Yahoo! Arcanum Online will offer all the text based publications (contents of their CD-s and DVD-s) they ever published.

July will be a testing month with free accounts, from August the service should go into a paying one. How much, you'd ask. While I'm not entitled to give out the figure Arcanum CEO Mr. Biszak mentioned in a private talk back in late April (watch out for stuff later here on Radixlog about our meeting), its yearly subscription was then planned to be more than a CD's price, and less than that of an Arcanum DVD.

To claim your free July account you should ask for it via email, call them or visit them in their office.

OK, we have quite much lagging with reporting on Arcanum publications that came out the last 12 months. Should make up for this.

A new book by sociologist Anges Losonczi has oral histories about lives of families at the turn of the Millennium - with retrospection to the difficult times of the 20th century. 60 stories can be found in the book.

While at the cemeteries/burials subject, according to that page on Hungarian Radio's site, a new album with tombstones in the county was published in May 2004. The album covers tombs of notable people and/or of artistic, historical value. Page also has that this album is the 4th in a row sponsored by the "National Memorial Society".

Dr. Peter Nagy sent the info to the Csaladtortenet list that a new book covering nobles families of former Pozsony County (now Bratislava, Slovakia) came out this week. Title is "Slachta bratislavskej stolice", publisher Agentura Luigi, series title Series nobilium.

Imre Harasztosi of Hungarian Village Photography announced his newly published CD containing photographs taken recently of Hungarian villages by him (scroll down to the bottom of the page). 223 photos are on the CD, there is no list of the included settlements given this time, though.

Leland Meitzler of Heritage Magazine announced his distributorship of a relatively new guide for Romanian genealogy research: Romanians in the United States and Canada.

Kolozsvár's (Cluj-Napoca) publishing house Korunk came out with a new title: "Álló- és mozgóképek". The book is a collection of memories from aristocratic families' members in the post-1945 Romania era.

Looking at the table of contents of the current issue (November/December 2003) of Heritage Quest Magazine one can find the second article in a series by professional genealogist Wade Hone. This time he discusses church resources. The first one was an introduction to history/geography of the region.

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.

I read in the current issue of Dick Eastman's genealogy newsletter that Family Tree Magazine has a new book: The family tree guide book to Europe. Book is probably not without some merits for researchers of the region.

I've just visited the site of the Slovak Genealogical-Heraldic Society and noticed some new things there.

The papers of the 2001 Slovak genealogy conference in Martin has been published and can be ordered on the site.

The society announced the competition for the best Slovakia-related genealogy work. Deadline for this is June 2004. This competition looks like to be organized every three year.

The publication of the Guide to Slovak and Central European family history is still to come. Perhaps more donations are needed - or they don't have the chapters ready? Well, there seems to be not much progress when compared to the year 2000 capture of the page by Web Archive Org.

The Hungarian language site of Talma Publishers has that they offer the award winning "A történelmi Magyarország atlasza és adattára 1914." (Atlas and gazetteer of historical Hungary 1914) for a discounted price until Christmas. They ship it for 3640 Hungarian Forints, instead of 5600. Whether this discount is good for foreign addresses, too, or not, I'm not sure. If interested, ask them.

A few days ago I had the chance to meet Arcanum's CEO at a computer show. They advertize themselves as the largest electronic content provider - publisher in Hungary. I believe this to be true. They have been teasing Hungarian family historians with their publications for years now. A significant part of their titles are either genealogical by nature or they are used by genealogists, as well - I mean local histories, archival sources, bibliograpical works.

They publish their titles on CD, and recently, they started with DVD compilations. Their new DVD no. 3 and no. 4 are compilations for the local historians and genealogy researchers. Visitors of the computer show had the chance to buy them at half of the normal price - got my copy for sure :P

The CEO told me that in the foreseeable future they continue to focus on CD and DVD products, but they might start with payment based internet content should there be enough interest in this.

He also mentioned that they might consider taking the free genealogy resources on the site (the works by Iván Nagy and Béla Kempelen) off, so, alarm!! do your searches until this happens. Or buy the CDs. Or wait for the pay service %o