Rózsa György (szerk.): The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1826–1976.

I. Historical outline

From 1946 exchange relations were renewed with the Academy's six Acta published in foreign languages. International relations were established with only 65 institutions in 1947 and this was raised to the level of 254 by 1949. In 1949 with the help of the government the reading room for books and the one for periodicals were re-furnished and other rooms were restored, too. Because of longer opening hours the number of readers increased. Acquisition of books and periodicals also increased with 7 000 publications, 530 foreign and 170 Hungarian periodicals in 1948. The Manuscript Department was reorganized and the organization of the Oriental Collection started. The increasing number of librarians made it possible to fulfil more and more new tasks. After the years of isolation and after restoring the devastations of the war the Library was able to recognize its tasks, to modernize its organization and methods so that it could efficiently serve the Academy and the Hungarian world of science. Pursuant to the Act XXVII of 1949 on the reorganization of the Academy, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences became the supreme scientific body of the country and this opened a new area in the history of the Library, too. The Academy become responsible for the top-level management of research works, defining the main trends in research, and for ensuring creative cooperation between scientific activity and practice.Within the framework of the Academy a network of research institutes has gradually developed. The Library's new scope of activities described in the directions of the Academy's Presidium in 1953 is as follows: 1. The Library of the Academy supplies Hungarian scientific research with Hungarian and foreign documents (books, periodicals, manuscripts, microfilms); 2. through regular exchange relations, it sends Hungarian special literature, particularly publications of the Academy, to foreign scientific institutions, moreover it acquires scientific publications from abroad by means of intensive exchange relations; 3. it renders the institutional libraries affiliated to the Academy's network different services and gives them professional assistance; 4. it takes part in the nation-wide inter-library work aimed at developing the Hungarian socialist library system; 5. as an independent scientific institution it conducts researches in the fields of library science and other specialized branches of knowledge. The instruction of 1953 by the Academy's Presidium and the orders of 1958 and 1968 by the Minister of Education deals with the scope of the Library within the framework of nation-wide library system. The new tasks necessitated the reorganization of the Library itself. In 1950 the Library changed over to the so-called belt-system of processing, to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and from the former system of shelving books in an arrangement by broad subject fields, the Library turned to current number of accession order of shelving. An up-to-date network of catalogues has been built up. In 1953 the Information and Bibliographical Department, the Microfilm