56th Annual Conference of the Association of Hungarian Librarians
2025. July 29.
In July 2025, the 56th Annual Conference of the Association of Hungarian Librarians was held, this time in Debrecen.
Qulto / Monguz participated with a booth again this year, where a total of 9️⃣ of our colleagues had the opportunity to meet and chat in person with long-seen clients and acquaintances.
⚡️ Our lightning quiz available at the exhibition stand closed with over 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ completions – that is how many of you played with us for a delicious coffee, a grab bag, or smaller gifts. Among the responses regarding technological innovation and development – in line with actual trends – the demand for the following stood out:
🧠 the application of artificial intelligence (AI),
🖥 the expansion of digital content and services, and
🌱 green library initiatives.
Although the venue and the first day of the event were unfortunately marred by the heavy rains and storms of the preceding days, the weather was kinder to participants for the remaining days, allowing everyone to focus on the professional and exhibition programs.
Interested attendees could start the second day with a pleasant walk in the university’s Botanical Garden, where outdoor plants and two greenhouses – the palm house and the succulent house, featuring a wide variety of cacti and other succulents – were presented.
As the start of the professional program, it was mentioned during the Opening Plenary Session that the number of participants reached nearly 500 people. There was also discussion about library tasks adapting to a changed world, including providing assistance in filtering the essence from the vast flood of information and the importance of public collections serving as both innovative archives and meeting places.
Following this, István Monok spoke about the role of academic libraries in the 21st century. In his presentation, he highlighted that cooperation within the library profession would be vital, an area where we are unfortunately weak. In addition, he outlined the possibilities for implementing traditional library tasks in the 21st century: in collection management, processing, and information services. In collection management, he considered it important to complete the primary collection scopes. In his view, processing in the coming times needs to focus on providing processed holdings with new, useful metadata; a sort of re-evaluation of data is necessary, even through the controlled use of artificial intelligence. In information services, among other things, the building and use of reliable domestic scientific sources, such as the MTMT (Hungarian Scientific Bibliography), is important.
A very interesting addition regarding artificial intelligence is that currently 60% of its training data comes from unverified sources, while only 16% comes from verified sources. Furthermore, by the end of this year, only 20% of printed materials in Europe will be available in digital form, so the claim that everything is available on the internet is not true at all.
During the afternoon sectional presentations, we heard about the repositories of DEENK (University and National Library of the University of Debrecen), the workflows of digitizing old books, as well as stereotypes related to the library profession in connection with librarian training in Debrecen, and actual librarian knowledge and skills.
On the final day of the professional part of the conference, Qulto colleague Miklós Czoboly also gave a presentation on the importance and possibilities of measuring library data within the framework of the KIT professional workshop.