News on MOKKA, the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue (Part 1)

MOKKA is the acronym of the Hungarian name of the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue. MOKKA was founded in the middle of the 1990s by the 15 most important Hungarian academic, research and special libraries. The content of its database has doubled since the launch of the project. Currently the number of participating libraries is 29 and the database contains nearly 5,5 million catalogue records. MOKKA has been subject to a number of challenges over the past few years. The manager of the project, Geza Bakonyi, outstanding figure of Hungarian librarianship and Deputy Director of the Library of Szeged University died in 2007. In the same year, the entire managing committee of MOKKA Association has changed. In addition to the management changes, new strategic principles were set out for the future development of the national shared catalogue. The first and most important step will be the fusion of MOKKA and the location database of the National Document Delivery System. These two national systems have been operating in separate structures till now. Their fusion will reduce parallel cataloguing efforts and will make it possible to establish a comprehensive national document delivery system. This project will be carried out by the National Szechenyi Library and the University and National Library of the University of Debrecen. Scientific and Technical Information plans to publish a series of articles on the progress of the project.