Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 2002

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

Society for Philately (Mafitt) and some 30 programs for children and students were held at the Stamp Museum. The student group also did quite well at the Junior Stamp Exhibit at Várpalota. The foundation also builds professional level relations by organizing museum events linked to world telecom and world postal days, to a Telecom May Day Festival at Diósd, and to Postal Museum concerts.

The Association of Museum Friends, which has 150 members, holds museum programs once a month except for July and August. The Mid-Summer Day’s Fire Jumping at Hollókő is one of our standing events.

We have good and balanced relations with both the print and the electronic media. Thirty-seven articles on the two museums made it into the print media, while television did 19 items, the best of which covered the series The Tales Told by Business Signs at the Postal Museum in Budapest.

International Relations

Our liveliest relations are with similar museums in other countries. In addition to exchanges of publications and mutual visits, we offered active assistance to the Slovak Postal Museum in collecting materials to open a facility in Banská Bystrica. Stamp Museum staff visited the museum, and attended a conference of museum curators combined with an international exhibit of stamps, in Bratislava. The Postal Museum provided a six- week internship for Björn Egger, of the Hamburg Communication Museum.

Publications

Our 2001 yearbook appeared and included the annual reports and working plans left unpublished because we had run a combined 1999-2000 anniversary yearbook. We completed a Hungarian and English language catalogue of the new permanent exhibits at the Museum of Telephony. We submitted a camera-ready catalogue of the exhibit at Diósd in a bid for a grant from the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage, and plan to publish it in May 2003.

As planned, we used the funding (HUF 0.47 million - approx. USD 2000) received from 2002 donations of 1% of income taxes that taxpayers are free to designate to the charity of their choice to design a memorial to telecom workers killed by violence or accidents in the line of duty. In 2003, we will begin collecting the 1%-s for the memorial itself, the winning design being the work of Pécs sculptor Ferenc Trischler.

Budapest, January 2003

346