Processing of the engravings, etchings and woodcuts of the Apponyi Collection in the National Széchényi Library

The engravings, etchings and woodcuts in the Collection of Ancient Books in the Széchényi Library give a good account on the European reception of the events in Hungary from the 16^th to the 18^th century. The images either came from Sándor Apponyi?s Engraving Collection or from the so-called Apponyi Hungarica Book Collection. The Engraving Collection consists of about one thousand documents, the Hungarica Collection counts some three thousand volumes. The number of the pictures having some Hungarian connection in the contents can be between ten and fifteen thousand. Considering their subjects, most of them are portraits, views of cities, depictions of battles and sieges, but there are among them also many maps, military maps, allegories, genres, portrayals of historical events and thesis leaves.

The processing of the engravings, etchings and woodcuts began already in the 1990s, in the case of the Hungarica Book Collection as a thematical card catalogue, and as a numerical card catalogue for the Engraving Collection. From 2002 on, as part of an OTKA application, an Access-database was developed to help the deeper exploration of the pictures. In the database all the technical and editorial data, the peculiarities of the copies, the information about the artists and the depicted persons and events, the text of the inscriptions and signatures, the relating bibliography, the description of, and the remarks on the illustrations can be recorded. In 2007, pursuing the OTKA application, the description of the 18^th-century representations also began. Until now, almost three thousand illustrations were processed and nearly one thousand of them were already digitized.

It was also in 2007 that a match was created between the fields of the Access-database and the HUNMARC fields. As a result, the achievements of last years gradually get into the online catalogue of the National Library, at the moment without pictures. The Hungarian Digital Image Library (MDK) program, which started last year, uses the metadata of the OSZK online catalogue and joins them with the digitized versions of the documents. As the first step, one thousand engravings, etchings and woodcuts become available via internet.