Rózsa, George: Some Considerations of the Role of Scientific Libraries in the Age of Scientific and Technical Revolution. An Essay and Approach to the Problem (A MTAK kiadványai 50. Budapest, 1970)
12 literature information to contribute its own inquiries, theoretical and practical, to raising and formulating the needs. All this may seem obvious or even commonplace, but these problems will be put in another light by taking stock of the individual products of special literature information, a good part of which will appear as being produced without adequate planning or "market research". The "hypothetical multi-channel" model of the flow of secondary information and of organized special literature information in general may be outlined (through the example of an imaginary industrial company) as follows : The company subscribes to a foreign technical journal, most essential in respect of the given company's field, namely, X, carrier of primary information; and is also receiving: Уj international abstracting journal (Western), a carrier of secondary information, covering X,, too; Y, international abstracting journal (»Soviet, Referativny Zhurnal), another carrier of secondary information which, too, covers X,; Y 3 abstracting journal of a national documentation center, a third carrier of secondary information, which naturally also covers the professionally so important X 4; Y 4 abstracting journal of the national documentation center or institute of the given industrial branch which, again, may not leave out X 4; Y 3 information (documentation) bulletin, published by the company which besides Y 4 — Y,, reviews, in detail, X, as the most important technical journal of the given industrial branch since the company knows best and there is much logic in this what it needs, and, after all, X 4 can be most rapidly and directly processed "at home" and addressed to the "desks". And now the circle closes: there comes the chief engineer or the chief technologist and requests X 4, the carrier of primary information because no documentary publication can substitute for the direct scanning of the so important X r It is highly probable that this hypothetical "multi-channel" model is, by and large, characteristic of the flow of special literature information. This being so, the question arises whether it is not more feasible to adopt the much more efficient end economical method of buying "licences " from abroad by analogy with the problems of R & D and in so doing to rest content with the most outstanding international abstracting journal than to produce an ineffective maze of secondary information in a more primitive way and in a „multichannel" system at national level? The model outlined above would certainly seem "demoralizing" were the author to suggest against bis intentions and convinction — that there is no need for documentation and it is not worth while dealing with it and spending on it, an attitude shown, unfortunately enough, bvmanyin the economic and technological life, or at .least their neglecting this problem refers to such an attitude. The author's main argument is precisely that the cause of scientific information should be treated on the basis of serious programs elaborated with scientific methods, without exaggerations and with a view to the interests of science and the national economy.
