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)
16 was of a merely technical character. To be sure, the forerunner of contemporary abstracting journals, Chemisches Zentralblatt, started as early as 1830, and documentation archives were set up within the technological and development offices of industrial plants. It is also true that archives of economic documentation started their work in those early years within or outside libraries. 6 This new-tvpe information demand was characterized, first of all, by speed, by the many-sided presentation and analysis of the content of periodical literature in compliance with the customer's needs, and also by the processing of documents other than traditional publications (business reports, prospectuses, price-lists, and so forth). All this naturally involved the development of working methods and forms not peculiar to scientific libraries. Thus, for instance, one most essential function of scientific libraries, the preservation of the holdings, is partly or fully absent from documentation. The literature, presented and analyzed by documentation, is not necessarily available at documentation centres whose main ta.sk is not to preserve the source material Imt to supply information of it. This, in fact, is its chief peculiarity. However, it should be added that no theoretical consideration is against uniting or combining these two basic types of information services within one and the same institution as proven — and also disproven by many examples. The legal status and name of the servicing institution, the place of these services in the hierarchy within the institution are all practical,administrative questions not affecting the merit of the problem. Viewed from a scientific angle, the relationship between the two types of services can be nothing but coordination. It is, then, just as improper to look upon documentation as part of library operations as to qualify it as fully independent of the library. The former conception has long been made obsolete by practice: documentation has its own ways and methods, "means and modes of expression" deriving exclusively from its peculiarities, presentation, analysis, and transfer of information —, which justify its independent operation wherever possible and when necessitated by the circumstances. The latter conception has never been proven, either theoretically or in practice, and as to the theoretical definition of documentation, it is not less uncertain and vague than that of library science. It should also be kept in mind that the library conception has also undergone changes (particularly as a result of the activities of special libraries), the information conception of libraries has made certain approaches to that of documentation. Theoretically, the solution might be found in what library work, bibliography (which is at least as "independent" of library work as documentation) documentation have in common, and in what links up these three large spheres of information rather than in what separates them. 7 0 Chemisches Zentralblatt may be looked upon as one of the classical examples for the independence of documentation because right from its inception, it has been an abstracting journal independent of any library. However, this proves nothing, but nor does its opposite: had it been published within the framework of a library, this would not prove either that the natural workshop of the editing of an abstracting journal is the library. 7 The author has already defined his position in this matter in his work "A társadalomtudományi kutatás és a tudományszervezés tájékoztatási problémái" Budapest, 1965. Akad. K. pp. 174. (Information problems of social science research and the "science of science".)
