From the 2026 budget audit
A national archive frozen in place: the right reform for irreplaceable holdings.
The MTA Library's manuscript and Oriental collections cannot be recreated if lost — so the allocation is held at 9,917.5 million Ft, letting real-terms erosion discipline discretionary acquisitions without risking the custodial core.
Roughly 2,400 Ft per taxpayer per year — 9,917.5 million Ft, dominated by acquisitions, subscriptions, and conservation for a national research library.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: researchers, scholars, and the public who use irreplaceable manuscript and archival holdings. The unseen: the discipline a nominal freeze applies — real-terms erosion of roughly 20-25% over a decade forces the library to choose which subscriptions and digitisation projects survive, rather than automatically indexing every line.
Objection
"Freezing the library budget will damage Hungary's scholarly infrastructure."
Answer
The custodial core — conservation, manuscript security, irreplaceable holdings — is protected by the nominal floor. The freeze squeezes the contestable margin: journal subscriptions, discretionary acquisitions, services that face a real market price. Procurement discipline, not defunding.
Share if you think public library budgets should face the same prioritisation pressures as any household budget.
The analyst's verdict
MTA Library and Information Centre
Rationale
The MTA Library is a national research library and the custodian of significant manuscript and archival holdings, including the Academy's historical collections and the Keleti Gyűjtemény (Oriental Collection). The 8,870.6 millió Ft operating line is not ordinary office overhead; for a research library of this kind it largely reflects acquisitions, database and journal subscriptions, digitisation, and the cost of conservation. A national archival and manuscript-custody function — the physical preservation of holdings that cannot be re-created if lost — is the kind of bounded, custodial mandate that the framework treats with caution: the holdings are irreplaceable, and abrupt defunding risks irreversible loss of cultural capital that no later appropriation can restore. That is a genuine reason against an Immediate Cut. It is not, however, a reason for indefinite real-terms growth. A library's collection mandate is finite and self-limiting; the digital-subscription component in particular is contestable and should face procurement discipline rather than automatic indexation. Holding the line at its nominal level lets real-terms erosion at typical inflation reduce its real claim by roughly 20-25% over a decade, which forces exactly the prioritisation — which subscriptions, which digitisation projects, which acquisitions — that an indexed budget removes the pressure to make. The custodial core is protected by the nominal floor; the discretionary acquisitions margin is disciplined by the real-terms decline.
Transition mechanism
Freeze the allocation at 9,917.5 millió Ft. Direct the library to separate, in its own reporting, the irreplaceable-custody cost (conservation, climate control, manuscript security) from the contestable subscription-and-service cost, so that the real-terms squeeze falls on the latter. Encourage cost-recovery on reproduction and commercial-use licensing of digitised holdings.
Affected groups
Library staff (no reduction under a freeze); researchers using the collections (service maintained in nominal terms, with the discretionary-acquisition margin tightening over the decade).
Free Society Institute
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