IMOLA : renewing national library services in Hungary

Tóth Kornél <>
MTA SZTAKI

In the first half of the lecture the author reviews the efforts that the Hungarian librarianship made on the development of a central retrieval search interface. The main objective was to create a web service in which the library catalogues ? built isolated during the past decades ? can be accessed from one point and the metadata (records) can be retrieved in parallel. Among other initiatives, MOKKA and ODR projects will be analyzed in detail, observations will be presented and some conclusions will be drawn from the observations. The author reviews the achievements and tries to point out objectively the shortcomings too.

In the second half of the lecture the author draws a conception, which was evolved in the library information sciences workshop of MTA SZTAKI and Monguz Kft. in the last years. This conception utilizes the experiences of the realized projects and considers the international trends. The work name of the conception is ?IMOLA?, which is an acronym from the Hungarian words, translated as: ?Integrated MOKKA, ODR and OLA databases?. The heart of the conception is a confidence that the main central services of the renewing library system ? Hungarian Distributed Common Cataloguing (MOKKA), National Document Supplying System (ODR) and National Location Database (OLA) ? should be developed on a common basis, so the duplication or multiplication of the record-heritage could be avoided.

The common basis does not mean necessarily physically one database, but it is should anyway be visualized as one whole robust system built on common technology. In this system the harvested or online accessed records can be reached in one logical container. In the past years the MOKKA and ODR databases were built separately. Instead of this separation, the IMOLA conception feels that the common basis is necessary for developing an efficient and modern service that provides single-point access to the record heritage of the Hungarian libraries. This solution could be the basis of the planned OLA too. The objectives of the MOKKA, ODR and OLA can be defined as service interfaces, or views built on this common basis.