For my second day in Budapest, I spent the afternoon getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Library and Information Center of the Hungarian Academy of Science. My tour included a wonderful visit with the Director General and his team. While I can’t think of an equivalent institution in the U.S., the Academy of Science is responsible for collecting all works of Hungarian culture produced in the country and abroad. They have a database, or what we might refer to at the University, as an institutional repository, where scholars can and, in some cases must, contribute their articles and works. The Academy is a public institution with branches throughout the country. Faculty and students from the nearby Central European University primarily use their collections. Housed in two buildings connected by a secret passageway (which sadly I didn’t see!), the collections are vast.

Most of my time was spent in the rare books and manuscripts division. The division has over 1,200 incunabula—books printed before 1501—and the book shelves in the staff space were lined with these impressive volumes. The staff had kindly pulled 4 books for me to look at. There are two librarians who manage the entire rare books collection. They grapple with the same challenges as us—how to make these book discoverable and accessible so the public can find out about them. They’ve done a lot of digitization work to scan some of their most valuable works.

Below are a few photos I took of their treasures.

The books chosen for us to view includes a leaf from the Gutenberg Bible housed in a blue leather binding, and incunabula (the larger volume on the table) which has the first image depicting the town of Buda using a wood cut.

The red volume (also pictured above) is an illuminated manuscript from the 1500s.

This bound manuscript is a cipher! No one knows what language it’s written in or who wrote it or what it’s about!

I had a wonderful time getting to know the treasures in the Academy of Sciences!