Interactive history - georeferenced and connected archival documents
Creators: name: Telek Ágnes
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: One of our online surfaces for our databases is called “Digital Archives Portal” which is a joint surface for many Hungarian archives for online administration and to reach databases and requests for physical documents. Some digitized documents are available here as well. The other platform, called Hungaricana is especially for online research. This jointly, the huge database serves a representative number of the Hungarian GLAM sector, integrating multiple databases and document types, offering not only searching tools but even accessibility to the scanned documents themselves: - more than 100 data provider collections - multiply types of sources and collections - integrated and sophisticated search - georeferenced metadata and access via interactive maps Here we offer databases and metadata structure also, but this surface’s strongest skill is that a lot of digitized documents are easily available and readable here. This is also the site where we manage to solve the challenge of making connections between multiple various document types and the key connection is their geographical aspect: the lot numbers. The numbers are showing the amount of the lot numbers on the map, in other words: all the accessible documents through the site, are geo-referenced. Each and every document can have a geographical aspect. Architectural plans, notarial deeds, land registry files, vintage photographs and postcards. They all can be connected to each other and further, create a real data network. Having quite universal datasets about the documents, even the actors are visible In the past few months, the biggest development has been achieved on the site: the Budapest Time Machine was released on two different maps back in 2015: one was georeferenced and the other is vectorized. Both offered different types of documents to research. Recently we renewed the site by unifying the two maps into one: integrating all the georeferenced metadata and documents into the page: all the maps, all the documents, the transparent present maps, added newly digitized datasets and documents - and we also have a groundbreaking new feature. As a result of our contribution to the Óbuda University Ybl Miklós Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, architecture students have learned how to create 3D models from historical blueprints. They received the digitized drawings from us and delivered the finished building reconstructions in exchange. Even though those born digital data types face challenges as they need a completely different handling and interface as the digitized one – and this was one of the reasons that boosted the unification of the different map layers. Another project is just in the pipeline now: in contribution to the Contemporary Architecture Centre, we will receive data sheets of houses that participated in the annual event Budapest100, and researched mostly in our archive. In this case, our digitally published and physical documents are processed and turned into new documents which are also valid and worthy to preserve in an archival manner. These two examples mentioned above can cause a data-circulation in the archive.