General Collection Reading Rooms

The spacious General Reading Room is partly illuminated by natural light and contains 160 reader seats. On its free bookshelves, there are some 40,000 volumes including documents on the humanities. Reference Library materials are arranged in the order of ETO (Hungarian abbreviation for ‘Universal Decimal Classification’). See also Order of arrangement in General Reading Room. The following databases are available: EBSCO and World Biographical Information System (WBIS) Online. Librarian on duty in General Reading Room provides both professional and technical help, in case users want to search in various registers or in documents stored on the bookshelves of the Reading Room.We have placed clusters of comfortable armchairs and nice glass tables in the middle section of our General Reading Room. Also, we would like to provide extra space for group learning by putting together two rows of desks. In this section of the Reading Room, visitors are allowed to talk in a low voice.

NSZL’s Periodicals Reading Room has 30 reader seats and it serves users with original journals and newspapers asked for from the repository (the word ‘original’ meaning periodicals in non-microfilm or non-digitized formats). On the shelves of Periodicals Reading Room, current and bound journals, newspapers can be found: all in all, a 250-title collection (some 6,000 volumes). This is where Hungarian and international works on the history of press, press bibliographies and repertories can be found. Altogether 14 PCs are available for readers.

In Microfilm Reading Room, users can take a look at newspapers, journals and obituaries in a microfilm format. These documents have been converted into microfilm format for several decades because of preservation precaution and have been stored mainly in the repository. However, the most frequently wanted items can be found on free shelves in NSZL’s Microfilm Reading Room.

Services:

• 24 microfilm readers;
• Scanning from microfilm on 3 machines;
• Copying digitized images on CD or DVD;
• Printing in A/4 and A/3 formats.

Library staff is more than happy to help readers with the use of microfilms and also, to a limited extent, with the copying of microfilms.

This reading room has 60 reader seats and undisturbed work is guaranteed by 14 PCs equipped with Internet access.

NSZL’s History Science Reading Room has a very rich collection of documents. There are some 15,000 volumes on its free shelves, the bulk of which are Hungarian and universal source publications, concise and period historical monographs as well as works on local history, genealogy, church history and cultural history.

The arrangement of books in History Science Reading Room is made partly on the basis of the various periods of history and partly on the basis of the different angles of research into history (such as history of economy or cultural history, etc.)

See also Order of arrangement in History Science Reading Room (in Hungarian) [5]. Research fellows, students and other users are provided with continuous special information service.

This special reading room features 30 reader seats. Literature Science Reading Room’s stock of 15,000 volumes includes reference books on literature science (literary theory, genre typology and genre theory) and books on the history of literature (concise works, period monographs, analyses of the works of a given author, etc.). This collection also includes works as well as critical editions of major representatives of the Hungarian literature and the best works in world literature, frequently in the original language. See also Order of arrangement in Literature Science Reading Room (in Hungarian) [6].

Literature Science Reading Room has 8 reader seats equipped with professional, Internet-enabled PCs. For research fellows, National Széchényi Library provides special research seats and a staff on duty who helps with answering any question related to the given branch of science. Research work is also supported by literary databases which are not available on other terminals.

In this room, there is a central information service with 12 (unnumbered) reader seats. NSZL’s Reference Library comprises 10,000 volumes, primarily the major Hungarian and international reference books: general and special encyclopedias, thesauruses, dictionaries, bibliographies, a collection of biographic sources and repositories. All these are completed by various Internet-based sources, databases and guides made available on a dedicated network. Reference Library offers a constant information service staff working in shifts. Staff on duty gives information for readers either in person, on the phone or on Skype. See also Information services [3].