“With new technologies and new content for the digital transformation of the future”
NETWORKSHOP, the most prestigious Hungarian conference on computer networking and IT applications for higher education, public education, research and public collections, was held for the 32nd time in Veszprém, Hungary, between 12-14 April 2023.
Our company, as one of the sponsors of Networkshop, was represneted by 11 participants. Our colleagues contributed to the programme with technical presentations, in addition to active participation in the lecture sessions. Gábor Deák, head of the development department and Melinda Mátyás, public collection expert, presented the development of our eCard application in the poster session. Besides the presentation of the poster, a lively discussion evolved among participants on topics such as library standardisation, the technologies used in eCard and the future possibilities of creating book recommendations.
András Simon, client manager, presented in session III.07 Born Digital content management in public collections “Where can I write the inventory number? Born digital documents in collection management practices”, in which he addressed timely issues of altering library and museum practices. Today, a significant proportion of library and museum documents are already digitally generated and other parts of the collection are being digitised at great pace in all heritage institutions. The storage, preservation and servicing of these objects raises a number of issues for which new preservation and servicing strategies need to be developed to replace or complement the tried and tested solutions that have been in use in the past three centuries.
We are delighted that the National Public Employment Nonprofit Ltd. has awarded our company a silver level certification as a Responsible Employer. In the course of the assessment, companies and firms with exceptionally good practices, whose objectives serve the well-being of employees, were recognised in this way.
At Qulto, we work as a team, we do not work side by side but we cooperate. This is the key. With our broad product portfolio and HR-focused operations, we have made the Qulto brand a hallmark of diverse knowledge and a likeable company in the eyes of the team as well as clients. We are proud to be part of a group of 16 companies in the Southern Great Plain region that have been assessed as prioritising the wellbeing of their employees and who are eager to actively do so in practice.
On 14 April, we were honoured to have personally handed over the certificate of the silver level responsible employer certificate from Zsuzsanna Ökrös, representing the National Employment Nonprofit Ltd.
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Through NEN’s certification process – where we presented our good practices on team building, health promotion and ensuring an ideal work environment, among others – a third party assisted us to recognize what are our strengths, and where we still have possibilities for improvement. Thank you!
For the next two years, we will proudly own the ‘I am a Responsible Employer’ certification! And we are not stopping here, we have plenty more plans for the future.
We closed this year’s event way better than expected, and it was a great success, both from personal experience and based on feedbacks from participants. The professional programmes were also of great interest, and the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library – Budapest provided a wonderful setting for the event – it was an uplifting experience to meet and talk to colleagues in such a place.
Let’s meet again next year in person!
Our 2023 professional day in numbers
we had to close registration 4 days, as available places sold out in no time
the attendance sheet showed that 132 participants were welcomed in person at the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library
around 100 ladies were gifted with a small present on the occasion of Women’s Day
during the online broadcast, the YouTube platform showed 121 viewers as the highest number of followers
The Qulto Research Infrastructure (Qulto RI) is a distributed and virtual, domain-independent research infrastructure that provides essential support for the digitization, storage, organization, retrieval, publication, reuse, and search for relevant sources and plagiarism of higher education and research content in Hungary.
Main pillars of the Qulto RI are
🗸 Digitize
🗸 Discovery
🗸 SimilR
🗸 Repo
Want to have more insight into the collaboration of Qulto and ELTE DH, and the services offered by the connected infrastructures? Visit here!
Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data: Analysis of the Databases of Integrated Collection Management Systems
The Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C) international journal’s latest publication offers the scientific analysis of András Simon, our colleague and his co-author, Péter Kiszl.
Abstract of the article
During this research, the catalogues of more than 200 libraries and museums of Hungary and its neighboring countries were examined. The authors calculated the amount and the size of the metadata and of the full content records in the databases of their collection management systems, as well as the size and the type of the full content data and the size of the databases. By analyzing the results, the goal was to answer the following three questions: (1) Can any significant difference be established between the results according to country, nationality, or type of institution?; (2) How large is a metadata record or a full content record?; (3) Is it possible to establish a methodology for selecting a representative sample of institutions to facilitate further research? For planning the costs of data management, the size of the databases, the number of metadata records, and the variability of metadata and media records shall all be considered. A distinction should be made between the indispensable “primary” data to be preserved for a long time, and the “secondary” data units which are derived from the primary data. It is investigated in this article how to establish the size of primary data in the databases of collection management systems.
The entire work is available here:
Simon András and Kiszl Péter: Aspects of the Long-Term Preservation of Digitized Catalogue Data: Analysis of the Databases of Integrated Collection Management Systems Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, vol. 50, no. 2, 2021, pp. 51-64. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/pdtc-2021-0007
We held our first two-day online Qulto Days event on February 3-4, 2021, with a record number of more than 450 registered participants. Due to the epidemiological circumstances that still exist, those interested could follow the program on several online platforms.
We chose a Churchill quote as the motto for our event, emphasizing that even if there has been a lot of change in our lives and work, a lot of change and adaptation will bring development and is an essential part of life.
“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to change often.”
During the event we presented the digitization strategies of public collections, the tools supporting digitization and the examples of adaptation to COVID-situation through Hungarian and international examples.
The first day consisted of two main parts: the first set out the company’s key achievements, developments and directions for 2020, and in the second part invited guests, collection managers, librarians and museologists reported on their innovative solutions and experiences with the pandemic (Covid edition).
In the introductory part company managers László Kármán, Miklós Czoboly and Gyula Tarjáni evaluated the past year, emphasizing that the development did not stop, in fact, many organizational changes have been applied in order to make the operation of the company more efficient and transparent. These included a review of processes, the introduction of new processes, and the expansion of the Monguz team with experienced colleagues despite the pandemic. Our goals for 2021 include further improving results, strengthening communication (through online channels and customer satisfaction measurement), and expanding our product portfolio with newly completed or completed applications.
In his opening presentation János Pancza, QULTO’s portfolio manager, presented Qulto’s digital ecosystem, the elements of which are:
Regarding the Qulto2 platform he emphasized that it is FOLIO-compliant, has a microservice architecture and is entirely Hungarian, using technical implementations such as Docker, Keycloack authentication and React.
In our second presentation dr. Endre Fülöp system-engineer spoke about the different solutions of the Qulto semantic knowledge network, one of the exciting applications of which is cultural tourism. This was shown on the example of our LiteraTour application, with which our mobile phone can indicate if we are visiting a famous place of a literary work or vice versa: we can use a map to see what works are about the given city we are going to. In addition, this knowledge network can be used in the field of libraries: a FRBR catalog combining copyright information and editions of a work can be created with its help.
Our third, and perhaps most anticipated, presentation was about the mobile apps completed in 2020 and launched this year. Zoltán Erdős, head of the development department, presented the recently launched Qulto eCard application in the Google Play store, which allows readers of libraries to conveniently do their library affairs from the couch or the bus: they can extend, book, request a reservation, they can check what documents they are currently borrowing and if they have a debt. They can also set how often they want to be notified of upcoming deadlines in the application. The biggest news of the presentation was when we announced that the Qulto eCard application would be configured free of charge for libraries with a Qulto support contract, thus helping their digital presence.
In our fourth corporate performance, we wandered in the direction of the attraction. Gábor Deák, leading developer, introduced mobile and web applications mainly in the field of cultural tourism:
· With the help of our CityConquest 2.0 web application institutions can create cultural thematic tours related to the spectacles of the city, as well as quizzes and playful tasks.
· QuestionBank: an online quiz database that can generate questions based on the Qulto semantic knowledge network without the institution having to spend hours manually registering questions and answers in various applications.
· Qulto360: unlike mainstream international service providers, we can create a virtual exhibition of spherical panoramic images in a web application with several functions. With the help of the application, not only a phisycal space can be explored, but also digitized public treasures can be displayed virtually, setting markers,providing images, audio, video or even 3D objects, so that the user not only walks around the space, but also gets more information and stories.
· Storytelling: a new Qulto application for creative content creation that provides a “mindmap” view for learning a story, enabling a virtual exhibition to be more than just a linear experience, but also a freely traversable knowledge transfer based on user interactions.
· LiteraTour: the mobile application based on the Qulto Semantic Knowledge Network, which not only recommends literary works to the user based on different filters, but connects them (and their characters) to real locations, tourist activities, and notifies the user if there is a venue of a work nearby – making literature a part of our everyday lives.
In the second unit of the Qulto Day we could hear from Dr. Béla Lóránt Kovács, the director of the Méliusz Juhász Péter Library in Debrecen, about their latest, non-contact library service: a book vending machine with RFID technology similar to Foxpost machines. Such vending machines have been installed in several parts of the city, and after the books have been delivered, readers can pick up the volumes they want to borrow at any time with their reader tickets, as well as take the documents back to the vending machines.
Péter Szóllás, Head of Public Collection Department in the Ministry of Human Resources (EMMI), summarized the strategies of the libraries during the epidemic situation and also told about what central services they tried to help with information sharing on online interfaces and the summaries of the Library Institute from the library practices of the surrounding countries.
The Qulto event ended with a meaningful roundtable discussion, in which participants shared their library’s experiences with services provided during the pandemic and how permanent closure changed their work organization methods and interactions with readers. All our speakers emphasized that they worked mostly to build a stronger online presence for both readers and colleagues through various available forums and solutions.
On our second day we brought partner institutions from Romania and Poland to showcase their digitization practices and give strength and motivation to the staff of all institutions closed due to pandemics, that their work makes sense, and thanks to librarians and museologists, we get more and more information and knowledge digitally.
Here, too, we would like to thank all our speakers and the audience for staying with us online. We hope that our Central-East-European company can help more and more cultural institutions and public collections to share their heritage and engage audience.
Thank you for your support and we hope we can build 2021 together.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. (W. Churchill)
Join us live for the professional event on February 3 in Hungarian and / or on February 4 in English, where we will talk about exciting projects and current topics. Participation is free, you can register on the form available at the following link: https://tiny.pl/r1rr3
According to our plans, the event will be organized with the help of the Zoom application, the link required for connection will be sent to the registrants in the days before the event.We look forward to hearing from you! Join our iconic event straight from your couch!:)
As the summer of a most challenging year is over, September brings us a great opportunity to continue doing what we know best: develop meaningful solutions and projects for libraries and other cultural institutions.
In order to do that, we need to hear from you, dedicated librarians and other professionals from the cultural sector: what are your needs, your most daring dreams but also the biggest issues that your organizations are facing nowadays. That is why we are excited to announce our involvement in the upcoming Occupy Library conference, an online event that will take place between September 22-25.
Occupy Library is an informative event bringing together relevant voices for the future of libraries from Central, Eastern European, Black Sea, Caucasus, and Caspian regions. Among the conference’s core themes you can find some vital aspects for nowadays libraries: serving communities in times of crisis, emerging tech trends, public spaces and community engagement. The event is a great opportunity for sharing ideas and good practices on how libraries can improve the lives of the communities they serve. Given its international attendance, the language of the event will be English.
Qulto is proud to be one of the partners of this event. Within the conference, we invite you to visit our 2 booths: a static one, where we will broadcast presentations of our most relevant solutions and projects developed with and for the cultural sector, but also a dynamic one, where you can meet us virtually and participate in workshops and networking events.
So save the date and join us for this exciting event. We are looking forward to meeting you. Registrations will be open in a few days, so don’t forget to register via the conference website. The attendance is free of charge.
During the next few weeks, we will keep you updated on the topics and projects that we plan to share with you during the conference.
Find out more about the conference on their website and keep up with all the news on their Facebook page.
On 9th October 2018 Gül Baba Turbe was reopened in Budapest, Hungary with the participation of a Turkish and a Hungarian delegation. The project is an example of unique cultural cooperation between Hungarians and Turks.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán cut the ribbon of the Turbe after almost 3 years of renovation and construction work.
One of the novelties in the Turbe area was the establishment of Gül Baba Museum. Besides a nice physical exhibition area, a digital exhibition can be seen on a kiosk and displays. The content was prepared by the stakeholders while Qulto provided the technical framework of the whole digital exhibiton.
At the entrance of the Museum visitors find a touch screen kiosk with a historical map of Budapest in Turkish times. Mosques, bridges, districts and towers are indicated with different colours and icons. Visitors can zoom into the map to see the details of a particular area. In the future the content of the map will be enhanced with deeper explanations related to the places.
While visitors walk ahead, they can see two displays with rich cultural content. The first one is equipped with a software called Qulto Timeline showing the story of the Turbe from 1541 to 2018. Visitors can slide to different dates for information, pictures and soon videos. The other monitor displays architects and their plans of the Turbe.
There is a small monitor placed in a showcase where a video is displayed. The video was prepared by Asir Proje by collecting some old pictures and videos showing visits of Turkish delegations to the Turbe.
We would like to thank both the Turkish and the Hungarian stakeholders of the project, especially TIKA and Asir Proje for the opportunity.
We have been also delighted to be invited to a Business Forum organized by Turkish and Hungarian partners in contribution with ALX Hungary. The Turkish and Hungarian delegations also attended the business meeting. Qulto is happy to facilitate Turkish-Hungarian partnership with the digital developments for the Turbe and other projects.
#learn differently #it is fun to learn #reusing public collections #digital museum pedagogy # reusing public collections # digital museum pedagogy # interactive ducation #digital education packages
Qulto Education that belongs to our Qulto portfolio, is a software component supporting the creation and usage of interactive education packages. This software primarily provides assistance to teachers and lecturers working in the public education sector and public collection institutions, though it is effectively applicable in other fields, as well. The module gives the opportunity of learning in a fun way within the framework of school, library, and museum activities. Consequently, lecturers can use the recently popular electronic devices preferred by their students to raise interest in a given subject through combining online and offline education materials.
In the first development phase the software’s beta version was born. Further improvements are going on based on the feedbacks of participants of formal and informal education.We aim at creating a digital education tool which, besides mediating interactive knowledge and culture, inspires the youth to visit and discover public collections. It is also designed to connect public collection items and cultural services to further services, especially to public education.
The software is easy to use: teachers and lecturers working with Qulto Education can create products within education packages. Such products can be built up from public collection data, internal and external sources, texts and media contents. These products – quiz, timeline, word search, puzzle – by involving students in interactive tasks enable covering a certain topic or subject – let it be the history of a castle, the ballads of János Arany or some questions related to natural sciences.
Steps of creating digital education materials:
1, collecting sources and digital content (digital contents of public collections, external web sources, own images)
2, creating your personal education package (products of an education package: quiz, timeline, word search, puzzle)
3, the education packages can be presented within the system, or can be exported to several formats, which makes it easy to add further content, and edit them with other software
Lecturers can put together the education packages either themselves or in cooperation with their colleagues, and the completed materials can be made available in the institution’s open access catalogues. The presentations, exercise sheets can be integrated into the course schedule both in online and offline mode, assisting to cover a given topic with the help of public collection contents and other materials.
Planned functionalities and further development ideas of Qulto Education:
– Linking products: linking the already existing products to each other in a specific order so that they function as a linear guidance, and which can be presented/played without interruption
– Adding further products: already existing products would be extended with elements such as storytelling, mindmap, and some other playful presentation tools
– External sources: extending the range of supported external sources
– Supporting group work: authority management and defining certain roles would assist group work, which would include either working on education packages simultaneously or exercises that require students’ active involvment
The competition is now open for all ICOM member cultural heritage institutions!
The F@IMP 2.0 (Festival of Audiovisual International Multimedia Patrimony) is organized by AVICOM, the ICOM International Committee for Audiovisual, New Technologies and Social Media. F@IMP 2.0 is an instalment of FIAMP (Festival International de l’Audiovisuel du Multimédia sur le Patrimoine), an international event aimed to encourage and to value the production and dissemination of audiovisual products (films) and innovative multimedia technologies (websites, interactive programs, mobile applications and creative and interpretive exhibition installations) initiated or produced by museums or heritage and cultural institutions.
Last year, an online platform was developed for the festival, the faimpavicom.org site, which is the result of the dedicated professional work of Qulto in order to ensure easy and smooth upload of media products during the competition.
The competition for 2017 is open from 16 January 2017 until 18 April 2017, and we call all ICOM members to apply for our competition with a new, cheaper application fee categorised by countries.
Due to the new development, Youtube servers will be used to handle and convert the uploaded videos so that the everebody will be able to play and watch the films at the same time. The uploaded videos will be also archived on the site.
The winners will be able to upload their HD quality or long films to the portal to archive them, and present at the Award Ceremony that will be held in Jan Amos Komensky Museum, Uhersky brod, Czech Republic on 14th June on the occasion of 20th Musaionfilm festival.
For more information, please, visit the competition’s website here.
We are proud to inform you that our company has completed a relevant project for the Academy of Music in Łódź in the framework of the “Maintenance and Revitalization of Cultural Heritage” program.
The primary goal of creating the game is to present the renovated and restored interiors of Charles Poznański Palace, which is owned by the Academy of Music in Łódź. The game was funded by EEA and Norway Grants, and was translated into three languages: Polish, English and Norwegian. It is available only for desktop PC-s.
3D model scanning technology has been used in the course of the work. Our company cooperated with a Polish firm, ArchiTube, that was responsible for scanning the building and specific rooms, where the main plot of the game takes place. Source images have been provided in excellent quality in order to guarantee improved user experience.
The main mission of the game is to find Grażyna Bacewicz’s missing sheet music hidden somewhere in the palace. Players have the opportunity to move around the place freely, enjoy and admire the beautiful interior of the palace and its rooms, discover and get to know the history of the place and people. During the journey, you can find some quizes and puzzles awaiting to be solved. In each room, a treble clef is waiting for you with a question. All questions are related to music and history, and not necessarily easy. So be prepared to use your brain! After giving a correct answer, you can discover the place further, and get closer and closer to finding the sheet. The game also offers some adventures for you, too – you can meet a good ghost, who warns you about a bad ghost prowling in the palace, and with whom you have to quiz fight at the end of the game. After giving five correct answers, you get a key, which opens the place with the hidden sheet music.
The project was finished in December 2016, so we hope it will not only be a source of fun, but also some good lesson of history!
The Qulto Research Infrastructure (Qulto RI) is a distributed and virtual, domain-independent research infrastructure that provides essential support for the digitization, storage, organization, retrieval, publication, reuse, and search for relevant sources and plagiarism of higher education and research content in Hungary.
