(MTI) - Parliament approved the amendment of Hungary's film law and museum law on Monday, paving the way for the transformation of the Hungarian National Film Archives into MaNDA, Geza Szocs said.
In recent years, various Hungarian public collections digitised a considerable amount of cultural content with the help of state support but the majority of this data is inaccessible to members of the public, Szocs said. Additionally, these files are stored in closed systems, often incompatible with each other, he added.
The task of MaNDA will be to make these contents accessible in an informative and educational way using a central interface and digitise new or yet unprocessed items, Szocs said.
Another important task will be to contribute much Hungarian content to Europeana, a European cultural portal which currently includes 14 million documents but only 0.09 percent of them from Hungary.
Lajos Lovas, head of thew Digital Archive Department at the Ministry of National Resources, said a beta version of the new MaNDA internet portal is planned to be completed in the second half of 2011.
The first step of the MaNDA project will be the development of a digital metadata search engine that will be able to present search results on the central portal. MaNDA is planned to function in the future also as a methodology centre, creating standards for digitisation.
