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(MTI) - There are nearly 60 images exhibited from a collection of millions of photos stored in MTI's archives outside the Godor Club in central Budapest. Downstairs in the cafe, another 600 digital images are shown in a slideshow on plazma screens. The exhibition is open until May 20.
Zsuzsanna Kalomista, head of the public-service archives of the Media Service Support and Asset Management Fund (MTVA), said at the opening that the largest audiovisual archive in Hungary has been created with the recent merger of the archives of public-service television, radio, Duna Television and MTI.
A large part of MTI's assets and ownership rights of property and the archives were transferred into a joint asset management fund as of January 1, 2011. More than 13 million negatives are stored in the archives, much of which must still undergo classification, preservation and restoration, Kalomista said.
An enormous digitalisation project assisted by the Norwegian Fund has managed to complete the classification, digitisation, coding and tagging of some 40,000 photos and negatives over the past year, as well as creating English texts for captions, she said.
Siri Ellen Sletner, the Norwegian ambassador to Budapest, said at the opening that the archiving project was an important step on the road to preserving a joint European heritage through which the past is preserved for researchers and future generations in Hungary and the whole of Europe.
Hungary received 135 million euros from the EGT/Norwegian Financial Mechanism in 2004-2009 which was disbursed to 99 projects in the country. Kata Szalontai, an official at the National Development Ministry, told the audience, that Hungary is likely to receive even larger funding in the next phase of the mechanism, and cultural heritage projects will continue to play a large part.
