The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)
PRESS AND MEDIA ARCHIVES - The Archives of the Hungarian Radio by István Salamon
BY ANIKÓ JÓZSA THE ROLE OF THE ARCHIVES IN CIVIL TELEVISION T he Archives is the largest television archives in Hungary, and an indispensable guardian of our international culture. The collected artistic, political and historical documents of the Archives need to be made more researchable - friendly, valuable and usable. Of course, not only for the television, but for other institutions dealing with film-so that inherited documents can be preserved. For example, the Archives of MTV Hungarian Television / Share Company is a unique historic collection of the arts, culture and television. Pre-history of the Archives The history of the Hungarian Television Archives is similar to the history as reflected in the changes occurring in society. It characterizes the work from experimental broadcasts up to our days. The Hungarian Television arrived to the point only nowadays that it maintains the Archives not only as a necessary element of programming, but as a public collection of national value. Nowadays the Archives can be considered as a uniform collecting repository of the last 44 years and collection of unique documents relating to the given period. The continuous organized work of forming archives has gone on since 1960 in the archives of MTV Remarkable programmes were acquired by the Archives then e.g. The Captain of Tenkes, Portraits and meetings, series of art. The last pasha of Buda, the 9 th symphony by Beethoven conducted by János Ferencsik, the Psalm Symphony by Stravinsky conducted by the composer, the first Evening tales, The Queen of Czardas, The Death of a Salesman, theatrical broadcast and the first colour TV film, The Tragedy of the Man have been broadcast many times since then. At present there are 160 thousand boxes of film, 80 thousand pieces of 1 inch, seven thousand u-matic, 50 thousand Beta, eight thousand Digit Beta, 6800 viewer VHS cassettes, 78 thousand photos and slides, 21 thousand rolls and CD audio recorder and 100 thousand volumes in the archives.
