The mission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive (NDA) is the enforcement of
the digitization of the documents of cultural heritage. Digitization does not only
mean the production of the digital representation of physical objects. The main
purpose is to make accessible cultural values, and to achieve as high a level of
integration among the different archives as possible. Based on some offered
standards and solutions, the metadata of the different archives can be freely
harvested which makes simultaneous searches possible. However, at this point an
important problem arises from the differences between the requirements of the
collection management of the archives and the searching expectations or
intentions of the users, or of the searching service providers. The generalization
of
the structured DCMI encoding scheme, like the term Period, will make it possible
to satisfy both the professionalâ??s requirement of sophisticated description and
the support of user search as well.
