Introduction – Éva Orbán

Orbán Éva, 2019

Where does the veterinary librarian come from?         a more serious CV              magyarul

It all started good three decades ago. Suddenly I realized that only books about animals can capture my attention, and the number of pets increased around me: finches, lovebirds, budgerigars, fish, frogs, hamsters, then the sick animals of a petshop who required home care.

No doubt,Lulu was the most important of them all, whom I have taken home from the court of a hospital. Since she was my first dog, I had no idea what to do with her. Luckily, she did. The first night I woke up finding her sleeping with her feet up in complete comfort near me in the bed. Well, this was an exception, but we spent almost 17 years close together in good and bad times. Now that she is gone, I look upon her more and more as a symbol of family togetherness, for she was the being who knew and loved all the relatives who had passed away during her long life. Since the world is not complete without pets, we learnt the language of rabbits and cats from Móka, Pici and Puha.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My family and me recently prefer to observe plants and animals in the wild to keeping them in captivity.We love birds, fungi and huge trees in particular.

I am especially fond of “repulsive” animals. I was the stepmother of the old vulture of the Budapest Zoo, I took part in toad saving actions, we have repatriated the hero of the flood, Bombina bombina and a city scolopendra, Litobius forficatus. Spiders live a free and happy life in our home, and we have good memories of nights spent with the Budapest Bat Conservation Group.

Hungary is rich in wonderful natural phenomena. Of these I like the Aggtelek carst and the landscapes, forests of the Zemplén mountain the most, maybe not by chance. I spent my teenage period in Sárospatak where we spent all of our spare time outdoors discovering the hills and the plain of “Bodrogköz”.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

No wonder, I was happy to joint the Veterinary Science Library in 1996. The real users of the veterinary library are animals, unfortunately sick animals, who “enjoy” the library services through the mediation of the veterinarians. I had animals in mind working at the library.

I belong to the generation of librarians the most far-fetched dreams of which were realized, and this is something important.

In the university years we typed catalogue cards with typewriters or strictly controlled stenctils then filed them into huge catalogues, not to speak about bibliographies and other aids typed diligently. We had to turn hundreds of pages of thick bibliographies to find a piece of data, and were impressed by the efficacy of punch-hole cards.

And we also learnt computer science: the algorithm of how to make scrambled eggs and programming with COBOL. We entered the rooms of huge R10 computers withholding our breath, and were happy about punch-hole typewriters.

We were lucky to have experts and professors who knew exactly what perspectives our profession has. The former have overcome all incredible obstacles and imported the first magnetic tape databases to Hungary. The letter has taught us, though only theoretically, with the principles and logic of modern data processing and retrieval. Tibor Horváth had the greatest impact, not only on our approach to librarianship, but also on that of several generations. For example, he started an optional course upon our request in automatic classification. This is a method based on strict linguistic and statistical methods requiring computerized database management and text processing that had not broke through in bibliographic databases, but serves as the basis of internet searching. It is their merit that Hungarian library profession could cope with the challenges of technology, and could adopt modern services, and compared to Western libraries, which seemed unreachable at one time, it has only qualitative disadvantages.

Thus lucky is the profession the dreams of which came true, and which can find the right piece of information for its clients in a few minutes and can provide the with it in the required format in another few minutes.

The librarian is a helping profession. There are librarians by whom homeless people warm up in the reading room. We, special librarians, are dedicated to share our dreams realized with our users: to provide quality information within a very short time, and to share our experiences in information retrieval to broaden the possibilities to receive information.

I started my librarian career at the Centre for Library Science and Methodology. Then I spent one year the library of the Móricz Zsigmond Secondary School, before I got to the library of the University of Veterinary Science. Meanwhile, I have also studied quality management which turned our instinctive efforts to provide better service into conscious and continuous work for measurable improvement. I spent twenty years in flow at the veterinary library and university, until October, 2016 when I was unexpectedly dismissed from my library director position explaining it with “rationalization”. In 2017 I returned to the alma mater, and started to work for the University Library of the Eötvös Loránd University from where. I retired at the end of 2020 and enjoy the freedom to go on with my work in the field of librarianship and quality management, and fostering our cultural heritage.