Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 29. (Budapest, 2013)
The Museum of Applied Arts in 2011-12
the recently founded Design Collection. The museum purchased prize-winning design works that had featured at the Hungarian Design Prize exhibitions, with the support of the Hungarian Institute for Culture and Art. This included Péter Toronyi’s Red Dot Design Award-winning Nissyoku lamp. The museum also took numerous notable artefacts as deposits, like the stained glass windows made after the designs of Ferenc Storno, which had been removed from the basilica of the Benedictine archabbey Pannonhalma during the course of its renovation. A series of 19,h-century book cupboards originally from the Ló- nyay Palace in Oroszvár (Rusovce, Slovakia), were also deposited by the archabbey in the museum. Among the complex restoration projects going on over the past few years special mention should be made of the restoration of the leather cases in the Esterházy Treasury, which were in a seriously damaged state of conservation. From the sum successfully gained from the National Cultural Fund it was possible to restore two items in their entirety, clean and conserve forty objects or object fragments, make a complete survey of all the material, and make a complete photographic record and a diagnostic report. As part of the on-going research, 2011 saw the publication of the second volume of the Hopp Museum’s Chinese ceramics collection catalogue entitled White Gold, Mohammedan Blue and Peach Blossom, published in both English and Hungarian, written by Györgyi Fajcsák. Digitization During the course of 2011-12 some major inroads were made into the digitization of the collection and the availability of the collection online. With support from the National Cultural Fund the whole internal collection management system was upgraded. This then formed the basis of the new collection database developed on the Museum of Applied Arts’ website. On the continually updated web gallery, which can be found on http://gyujtemeny.imm.hu, it was the museum’s chief works, and the most important pieces in the Art Nouveau collection, that were the first to be uploaded. The database is made available online both in Hungarian and English versions. Since 2012 the Museum of Applied Arts has been participating in a major international project which is aiming to digitize the Art Nouveau collections of all the participating countries, and put the results on the Europeana website. Twenty-three institutions are participating in the project which is being financed by the European Union. Participants in the Partage Plus project are uploading a total of 75 000 digital images as well as the accompanying detailed metadata from their own collection websites onto the Europeana system. Apart from the 1000 most outstanding pieces in the Museum of Applied Arts’ collection and the digitization of the designs and graphic works on the Archives, the processing of the finest examples of Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture is also taking place. The project’s central website is run by the museum, and can be found at: http://www.partage-plus.eu. 118
