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)
17 appeared not as a partner created by scientific and technical needs but as a rival. The expansive work of documentation and its sometimes unaccountable attitude towards the scientific library (exaggerated emphasis on the library's conservativism and on independence of library work) have only deepened the conflicts. In practice, all this appeared as quarrels over matters of competence, organization and administration, and the relevant theoretical considerations have led to misunderstandings or often to debates, showing a downward tendency though. The other process, the immense development of the public library system, in turn, has given a new impetus to "libraryorientedness" in another respect. Arising from the growing number of libraries, many-sided practical problems of training, organization, coordination, and those deriving from the development of internal library work have made it imperative to collect experiences and organize their exchange, resulting in methodological work which, in turn, gave rise to theoretical generalizations underlying what is known as "library science". Thus "library science", interpreted in different ways and understood to have different contents in time and space, concentrated essentially on the internal work of libraries, considering it as a scientific task which it really is in certain respects —, and in this endeavour the old library-oriented approach encountered an interpretation of "library science", evolved from the new practice of public libraries. The main reason for misunderstandings lies not so much in the label after all why should there not be a science for librarianship if there is theatre or film reserach —, as in the fact that debates over several decades have not succeeded in filling the concept with unambiguous content. Furthermore, several practical problems have also gotten into the concept of library science the solution of which , although requiring scientific training, cannot be looked upon as science. 5 What has been said of the library-oriented approach as the most general collective term necessarily applies to a certain part of elements of the other two "oriented" approaches, thus facilitating a briefer description. Documentation-oriented approach The objective reasons for the evolvement of the documentation-oriented approach are deeply rooted in economic and technological progress. It was about the turn of the century that the needs of technology and practical economic work raised demands for new forms, methods and content of information. This new-type demand was called forth by industrial companies, and, to a lesser extent, by science, and it would be a mistake to believe that it 5 By analogy, a surgeon operating on an appendix does not consider himself, and is not thought of as, a scientist engaged in scientific work. The same applies to an engineer designing a building, and so on and so forth. But no one would doubt that all these activities heavily relv on science, and these professional smust have scientific training and qualifications. Likewise, it is also obvious that not only the study of the theoretical foundations of these activities is scientific but also the theoretical generalization of experiences gathered from practice. Or to take a library example, classification as a library operation is an activity requiring scientific training but not science. The study of the theory of classification, in turn, may well be considered as science. The only question here is whether the theoretician of library classification is a scholar of „library science" or whether his activités - a form of scientific classification belong to the sphere of philosophy. However, what really counts is not the label but the content.
