Welcome to the Hungarian Archives Portal

The Hungarian archives portal was originally created by cooperation between local governmental archives, but other institutions such as the Hungarian National Archives later joined the initiative. The institutions involved felt the need to provide the public enquiring into the activities of the archives and into the results of their work with services which would facilitate both orientation and research. The portal enables researchers to explore by means of a website the documentary materials found in the archives of Hungary, both those involved in the cooperation and those which will join later. In order to the increase the efficiency of the research, a unified database has been created, and the content is continually being expanded. By using this unified database, interested researchers can obtain useful information on the whole of the documentation kept in the archives involved in the cooperation.

The portal is promoting the digitisation of documentary series spanning the whole of the country and the construction of databases for document collections drawn up based on identical principles and practice by incorporating their contents and thus enabling online access on its interface, making simultaneous searches possible among the most varied types of sources. Using new technology, it provides direct access to large-format maps and designs in digitised form, thus solving the problem of research via the internet.

The full bibliography for 50 years of our archival publications may be found on our portal, and besides this, the full texts of a significant number of publications may be read on our pages, or they are accessible by means of our combined search engine.

The legal measures and statutes regulating the work and activities of the archives, as well as a complete collection in the Hungarian language of the work directives and professional documentation stretching back for several decades is available on our pages as the Archival corpus.

Expansion of the contents of the portal is continually underway as a result of the joint work of the archives, and in its initial state it is already providing a rich resource for enquirers. We hope this is just the beginning, and with appropriate support it will provide an ever broader range of materials from the Hungarian archives.

Creation of the Hungarian archives portal was sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Culture from the budget for the Renaissance year of 2008. At present, the portal includes information related to local governmental archives, and to a lesser extent the Hungarian National Archives, but the editorial staff wishes to involve open private archives, professional archives and the archives of higher educational institutions in the circle of participating institutions in the future.