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)

II. International relations in the field of scientific information

SPECIALIZATION AND INTEGRATION: SOME ASPECTS OF THE DOCUMENTATION OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Introduction: Autarchy or integration of efforts and knowledge? 1. The growth trend of international organizations 2. The growth trend of the volume of publications of international organizations 3. Some comments on the terminology of international documentation 4. Aspects of the orientation of international documentation and its sources of information 5. Some conclusions: specialization and integration of international documentation services: an information network Annex: Relations between international documentation services (chart). Introduction: Autarchy or Integration of Efforts and Knowledge? The role played in progress by the division of labour is well known. The scientific and technical revolution accentuates this process. The division of labour is characterized, among other traits, by intensified specialization, whose results are well known: the proliferation of branches of human activity, the creation of new disciplines, and a tendency for a branch of science which had long remained a unity to divide into several branches. The consequence of this process is the division, diversification and ramification of specialized literature and, above all, of periodical journals and series. This process lies at the root of the problem expressed in the concept of documentation, but the phenomena of the division of labour and of specialization appear also in the area of international relations. The many changes that have taken place in the political geography of the world since the Second World War, the emergence of a whole host of States who have recently achieved independence and, side by side of the increasing diversification of international organizations and their activities have given rise to a specific documentation problem: that of international documentation. Faced with this complex problem of specialization and of the development of international relations, the international community believes that autarchy is impracticable and that the appropriate solutions to the different political, economic, scientific and other questions should be sought in the possibilities of multilateral institutional collaboration and cooperation offered by the international organizations. From the institutional standpoint, therefore, the international organizations represent a counter-trend towards integration, as against the specialized efforts of the different States, professions and branches of human activity.