The schoolbook collection of the National Educational Library and Museum (NELM) is unique in Central-Eastern Europe. It gives reliable picture about the past and present situation of public education, textbook edition and basic values. Educators, researchers and students in the library can study the history of different school subjects and education methods.
The collection contains all the books which were used in the basic and secondary level schools of Hungary and also schoolbooks of national minorities in different historical periods. There are only a few foreign language books, mainly from European countries. We hope, that cooperation with the Georg Eckert Institute will be a great help for increasing this part of the collection.
Since 2008 the library is a copyright library of schoolbooks, which means that it receives two copies of each official Hungarian textbooks. At the moment the collection contains cca 100.000 volumes.
The collection consists of the following parts:
- Rare books (before 1868).
- Textbooks published 1868-1948.
- Textbooks published after 1948.
- Foreign textbooks.
- Recently usable textbooks.
Users can get information about the collection from different catalogues. The webOPAC of the library (opac.opkm.hu) at the moment contains bibliographical descriptions of the textbooks published after 1980, and schoolbooks of elementary schools published 1868-1948. With the help of the European Union grant we carry on this project, and we hope that by next year the whole collection will be available through our online catalogue.
One of our future plans is to create a Central-European textbook collection, which can serve as a basis for comparative research projects. The cooperation with the Georg Eckert Institute means great posibilities and promises for us.
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