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)
13 IV. THE COMPARATIVE BACKWARDNESS OF THEORETICAL WORK IS ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS FOR THE VIRTUAL IRRECONCILABILITY OF CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL TENDENCIES IN LIBRARY POLICY AND THE DIFFERENT „ORIENTED" APPROACHES In respect of theoretical work and studies, the actual situation is far from heing favourable though the number of publications on libraries and librarianship makes up a separate library. For this there are many reasons, practical and subjective, one of them being that particularly since World War II librarians have had to face a vast amount of urgent daily routine work (storing, cataloguing, reference, and the related organizational, budgetary, etc. problems) on account of the information deluge and the increase in circulation, so much so that their energies and interests have necessarily been shifted towards the solving of -pressing functional, operational and organizational problems. Another factor affecting the comparative backwardness of theoretical work is what Marx said about science (but "mutatis mutandis" it applies even more to library problems), namely that the value of science as the product of intellectual work has always been underrated since the working time necessary to its reproduction is not proportional to the working time necessary to its original production. Thus, e.g., a schoolboy may learn the binominal theorem in an hour. 3 Thus was it that librarians with scientific ambitions abandoned the not too promising field of library theory and tended towards one of the "established" branches of science and scholarship where they were not exposed to indifference or to the danger of being possibly qualified as a scholar of a pseudo-science. It is quite another question that library theory may be successfully cultivated only in close connection with those specialized branches of science or scholarship the support of which forms the primary taslc and justification of scientific libraries. Another hindering factor has been (particularly in the past) the often unfruitful debates going on for reasons of prestige, between librarians and documentaliste at national level which, in fact, have for the most part covered organizational and administrative problems. As a reaction to the sudden advance of scientific and technical documentation, and also because the scientific library could really not readily respond to problems arising from the rapid development of science and technology (nor could it be prepared for it), libraries of the humanistic studies and social sciences found their historically developed attitude justified the stressed, one-sided, if not exclusively, study of historical problems (history of books and libraries, processing manuscripts and old books, retrospective bibliography, etc.). Raising the question of whether scientific libraries need "library scientists" or "learned, scientific librarians", this controversy is greatly responsible for the fact that library science, whose concept and scope has not been clearly enough formulated up to now, tends to give priority to well-established and widely accepted investigations into cultural history over library theory. It is obvious that what scientific libraries need are scientific librarians who have a creative proficiency in one or another branch of science or scholarship and are conducting research in it but who also pursue their profession 3 Értéktöbblet elméletek. 1. rész. Budapest. 1958. Kossuth К. pp. 315. (Theories on surplus value. Partul.)
