Digitised Legislation Knowledge Store – a digitisation project of the Library of the Hungarian Parliament

Abstract

The Digitised Legislation Knowledge Store (DTT) of the Library of the Hungarian Parliament is being implemented in the period 4 January 2010 through 30 June 2011, within the Electronic Administration Operational Programme (EKOP) of the New Hungary Development Plan (ÚMFT), with support from the European Union, and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. It is the objective of the project to digitise approximately 2 million pages of historical parliamentary documents, legal sources (official gazettes, decisions), as well as books and periodicals on law, history and politics; to build a database of these materials and to provide them on an integrated portal. The knowledge store to be created for the Parliament wishes to provide efficient assistance to legislation, to professional activities as a background to legislation, to education and research, and also to library reference work. The article presents, as a case study, the milestones in the planning phase of the library digitisation project, as well as the issues to be considered. It discusses in detail the selection of books to be digitised, tackles the problem of information technology planning, and turns attention to the main issues related to the digitisation work flow. The digital collection is expected to be opened in summer 2011. The materials not protected by copyright will be accessible to all on the new DTT portal free of charge; the content under copyright protection – as enabled by the Law on Copyright – will be available on a dedicated network.