From the 2026 budget audit
A specialist library funded at full cost by every taxpayer — why?
The KSH Library serves the statistics office's own researchers and a narrow circle of archive users. Its 305.5 million Ft allocation is frozen and left to erode in real terms as digital access makes physical collections cheaper to run.
Roughly 76 Ft per taxpayer per year — 305.5 million Ft total for a reference collection whose mandate is bounded and self-limiting.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: a specialised archive of statistical volumes and census records, available to researchers and the office staff it serves. The unseen: every working household whose taxes fund a collection that university consortia and digital subscriptions could serve at a fraction of the cost, while the nominal budget stays frozen year after year.
Objection
"But archival collections deteriorate if you cut their budgets — you can't rebuild a historical record once it is lost."
Answer
The freeze preserves the collection intact. Real-terms erosion at roughly 2.5% inflation does the work gradually, matching the pace at which digital distribution lowers the marginal cost of access. No records are destroyed; the transition is to a cheaper delivery model, not a closed archive.
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The analyst's verdict
KSH Library
Rationale
The KSH Könyvtár is the statistical and demographic research library attached to the office — a specialised collection of statistical publications, historical census volumes, and demographic literature. The function is bounded: a reference collection serving the office's own researchers, the Demographic Research Institute, and external users of statistical archives. It is not a rights-protection function and not a constitutional precondition, and a specialised research library is the kind of activity for which voluntary and user-financed models exist — university library consortia, subscription access, digitisation that lowers the marginal cost of access toward zero. But the line is small (305.5 millió Ft, 1.7% of the chapter), the administrative cost of separating it from the office it serves would be a material fraction of any saving, and the collection is a bounded, self-limiting mandate rather than an expanding programme. The honest classification is a nominal freeze: hold the allocation flat and let real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduce its real share by roughly 20-25% over a decade, which is the appropriate trajectory for a bounded archival and reference function. As statistical publication moves to digital-first distribution, the line should be expected to decline in real terms without an active decision.
Transition mechanism
Hold the allocation at 305.5 millió Ft in nominal terms. No active reduction; real-terms erosion at roughly 2.5% inflation does the work. Review whether the collection's access function is better served through digitisation and consortium membership when the next library-systems investment cycle arises.
Affected groups
None. The library's small staff continue; users of the statistical collection retain access.
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