Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
public subsidies as well. To understand the workings of museums today and define the tasks of museum staff, it is useful to know how the five basic tasks of a present-day museum developed. These are to take possession of cultural goods, to safeguard them, to care for this heritage, to foster culture through scientific research, and not least, to transmit that culture. An important side of the last is the educational and instructional activity museums do in conjunction with educational institutions. Mrs Gergely Kovács: Museum collections in a changing world There was a scientific session at Hungarian Television to mark the 40th anniversary of its foundation. Technical Director György Ágoston, outlining the history of remote vision, projected a picture of an iconoscope, beside the name Kálmán Tihanyi. He explained that he had found the picture on the Internet while exploring an American virtual museum. Tihanyi’s invention is clearly visible, along with the plate for storing the charge. Virtual museums have come into fashion. It is too early to say how many museum visitors surf the Internet, but there are certainly many, and their number is increasing. The channels of telecommunications are shrinking the world into a global village. There are plans for about 3000 artificial satellites above Europe. There is already no technical obstacle to about 10 per cent of mankind obtaining all the information they want in the first quarter of the next century, seated at home, before the invention born of a marriage of data processing with television. Our successors will have high-luminosity, large-screen television sets capable of receiving broad-band video signals and coupled to simplified computers. Sitting or lying in front of that magic box, or perhaps carrying about a portable version, they will be able to do all their correspondence, banking and shopping. Direct human contacts will be minimized, because the information-the reports, the instruction, the briefings, the news- will be obtainable directly, with the aid of a telecommunications device. So who in that ‘brave, new world’ will ever visit a museum? What will museums collect, especially technical museums, proud of their exhibits linked with their country’s inventors, the renowned products of their industry, and the technical equipment whose employment and operation were connected with historic events? What shall we collect? Perhaps the Transport Museum will go for an Airbus, the product of British, French, German and Spanish cooperation, providing scheduled multinational flights into and out of Ferihegy Airport. Perhaps the Postal Museum will collect Siemens telephone exchanges, because that firm won a tender to supply them to the multinational Hungarian telecom company Matáv. On the other hand, exchanges like that are used in many parts of the world. Should we all collect them? There will probably be no technical museum that manages to preserve the automatic, computer-controlled machine lines, just as the Postal Museum failed to preserve the first automatic letter-sorting machine, supplied by Toshiba. Never mind, they will be archived in the documents and on film. They will be virtually archived in a virtual museum. As for mass-produced technical products and equipment, should we be preserving the last working examples or the first to be made? If the latter, we acquire objects without a past, but save ourselves the ever more costly and difficult task of restoration. If the last example to survive in use is collected, it will have a notable history of its own. As an 262
