Digitising unique engravings in the Ráday Collection

Tripont and the Ráday Collection are working together on a joint project.

During June, Tripont staff digitised nearly 800 unique engravings from the holdings of the Ráday Collection. The valuable volumes luckily survived the fire that broke out a few years ago in Ráday Street. After the fire the Ráday Library, which forms the largest part of the collection complex, was moved to one of the external storage facilities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), while the archive is available to researchers and interested parties at the Budapest City Archives.

The Library comprises nearly 150,000 volumes, and the institution also includes special collections: the Ráday Monument Library, the holdings of the Old Hungarian Library, the Kálmán Benda collection, the periodicals collection and, of course, the manuscript collection. Its collecting scope is essentially Reformed and Protestant theology, the literature of the humanities, and also the literature relating to Hungarians beyond the borders.

The basis and most valuable unit of the Ráday Library is the former private aristocratic library of the Ráday family, which came into the possession of the Danube Reformed Church District (Dunamelléki Református Egyházkerület) in 1861. This unit contains about 15,000 volumes, 6,500 works. In addition, the library’s old-book holdings from other sources are also very significant – valuable incunabula, antiqua (publications before 1600), the collection of the Old Hungarian Library (Hungarian publications before 1711) and a large number of volumes published before 1850.

Tripont staff went out to the external storage facility to digitise the engravings found in volumes from the 18th–19th centuries. The special feature of the project is that the institution wishes to meet researchers’ needs, since in recent times it had been receiving more and more enquiries in which interested parties wanted to see specific pictorial representations. One specialist wanted to see a portrait of a 17th–18th-century pastor, others wanted to research old baptism and wedding illustrations, the depiction of a particular biblical scene, or even a surviving depiction of a church. The historiographical trends of recent decades created this research demand, because in the Western European academic world text has become equivalent to pictorial illustration. For this reason the library management would like to produce a unique engraving database from the digitised illustrations.

The digitisation specialists digitised the valuable material at top quality with the Phase One iXG camera system. The device is the market leader in the digitisation of flat objects, which it can photograph at A/0 size in a single capture. In addition to being the Hungarian ambassador of Phase One, the group of companies also pursues educational activity alongside its commercial activity.

Within the framework of the joint pilot project of Tripont and the Ráday Collection, researchers too will be able to access the hidden values in the Rádays’ books. The joint work will continue in the future. Since 2020 the Ráday Collection has been working on the complete reorganisation of its museum-grade holdings. The long-term goal is complete digital processing of the pictorial material of the museum holdings; the first step is the work begun with the pictorial material of the Hungaricana collection (1711–1850) that has now been digitised.

Source: https://radaygyujtemeny.hu/