Content provision on the DDT portal

Abstract

One of the main goals of the Digitised Legislation Knowledge Store project was to digitise outstanding works on law, political science and the history of the Hungarian Parliament, for the purposes of legislation, education and interested individuals. It was found most justified to digitise legal literature between the two world wars as it is the literature, arguments and term used in the period in question that best reflect the continuity of language and thinking within the literature on law and political science. The parliamentary literature collection includes books on parliamentarism, on the history of the Parliament, its organisation and operation. The works selected from the Library’s collection for digitisation were mostly published between 1850 and 1945, in Hungarian. In the Knowledge Store compiled legal sources represent a significant part: the official gazettes of seven ministries, and collections of decisions with the theoretical foundations by courts. During the project a total of 73 renowned journals in the field of law and political science were digitised, together with their articles (overall, 20,000 issues containing approximately 90,000 articles) which can be searched by author, title and subject. The documents are arranged in subject groups (called collections) and are managed by the DigiTool system. Information is provided by the integrated library system database, the connection between the two systems – through the same record identifiers. 40% of materials are protected by copyright, therefore, they are accessible only on site. In case of journals the protection period was set at 110 years from publication date. This means in practice that from January 1, 2013 the journal issues published in 1902 and earlier are accessible. The DTT portal constitutes a linked content management and collection management system which contains 1) digitised content with metadata organised into subject collections on the one hand, 2) related reviews about digitised content on the other, 3) plus earlier catalogued parliamentary materials in databases with a link to the new portal.