Digital scholarly editions in libraries

Abstract

Hungarian libraries have already made several attempts to collect and process digital documents. Today, e-books are also present in libraries and in their catalogues. A former institution named Neumann House produced a discography of CD-ROMs and started a project (named WebKat) for cataloguing Hungarian web publications. Today, some of Hungarian libraries are dealing with harvesting and preserving web content. However, there is a small chance to come across a digital scholarly edition (DSE) in catalogues. At the moment, libraries usually do not collect and process this type of documents. Since the creators want to publish and provide the relevant editions on their own, libraries - if at all - register them as remote- access documents. But, unless they are already integrated into some institutional infrastructure, nobody cares about the preservation of these editions. The paper interprets the currently used definitions of DSE, delineates them as documents and looks for solutions of their integration into libraries.