Hungary’s National Széchényi Library (OSZK) has made an additional 15 million pages of digital content available and launched a new unified online platform called Széchényi Híd (Széchényi Bridge), providing users with a single gateway to its digital collections.
According to the library, the expansion includes nearly 6.5 million pages added to the Electronic Periodicals Archive (EPA), around 500,000 pages to the Hungarian Electronic Library (MEK), approximately 7.5 million pages to the copyright-protected MEK+ service, 450,000 images in the Digital Image Archive (DKA), and 35,000 new digital records in its special collections.
During the first half of 2026, the EPA archive alone added more than 700 periodical titles, nearly 500,000 individual issues, and around 6.5 million pages. The digitized newspapers span from the mid-19th century to the early 1950s, documenting Hungary’s social, political, and cultural history.
The expansion also makes a wide range of regional newspapers fully searchable, covering Transylvania, Upper Hungary (present-day Slovakia), Vojvodina, Transcarpathia, Budapest, western Hungary, northern Hungary, and several Hungarian counties, including Csongrád-Csanád, Pest, Békés, Komárom-Esztergom, Somogy, and Hajdú-Bihar.
The EPA has also added the Hungarian News Agency’s (MTI) archive of news reports published between 1945 and 1987, contributing more than 1.5 million pages to the database.
The Hungarian Electronic Library has been expanded primarily with public-domain works, including nearly 1,300 Hungarian-language publications issued between 1531 and 1711 that are listed in the first volume of Károly Szabó’s Régi Magyar Könyvtár (Old Hungarian Library) bibliography.
The MEK+ platform continues to provide access to copyrighted works through a secure cloud-based system available in participating libraries across Hungary.
Among the newly digitized materials available through the library’s Copia platform are the musical scores of Ferenc Erkel’s opera King Stephen, manuscripts by György Kurtág, and the original manuscript of Mór Jókai’s novel The Novel of the Next Century. The library has also expanded its collections of graphic posters, historical sound recordings, and archival photographs.
The newly launched Széchényi Híd platform brings together the library’s catalogues and digital collections within a single search interface. The service supports advanced filtering and search functions, allowing users to access the institution’s digital resources without having to search multiple separate databases.
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