György Rózsa: Information: from claims to needs (Joint edition published by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Kultura Hungarian Foreign Trading Company. Budapest, 1988)
The author’s introduction
THE AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or know where we can find information upon it." (Boswell: Life of Johnson. 1775.) "To connect the country's mind with the nation's heart." (Victor Hugo, at the French National Assembly. 1850.) Recorded in a UNESCO document and accepted internationally is the statement: the strength of a nation lies in its raw materials, its sources of energies and information. The individual papers of this volume deal with information as a collective concept and treat the aspect of the theory and principles of subject literature as one of the salient topics of science and learning. From the general problems the author - given his special interests — has grouped his questions under three headings: - The professional and social aspects of the information revolution. - The role of international relations in the field of information and its relationship with national characteristics. - The information infrastructure of developing countries. As individual contributions these papers, in the main, have already been published in various collections as conference papers or as contributions to scientific and professional journals throughout the world, either in English, or in French, Russian or Hungarian. But for the first time, editorial work done for this volume gave them unity of structure. In so far as information is a basic resource of nations, this resource is an economic category too. The economics of information requires an information economy whose social-economic mechanism is a given information policy. Consequently information, and subject information in particular, is a complex research topic which is inextricably bound together with the organisation of research, with research on learning, with informatics and with librarianship. In other words it belongs to the field of interdisciplinary research with a strong orientation towards economics. All this makes the thought less heretical whereby a scientific organisation, like a large library or information centre should be managed similarly to a profit-making organisation. While the latter will show up a profit the former will surely yield an abstract profit in terms of intellectual efficiency. Writings that claim to have a perspective always move along borderlines between reality and wishes — which is understandable; one cannot forecast the past nor the future. We have to be content with approximations. The scenario of the future is borne
