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
101 It is thus quite understandable that steps have been taken to reduce the volume of documentation produced by the United Nations. On this subject, see the instructions given in General Assembly resolution 2836 (XXVI) on publications and documentation of the United Nations, which was adopted on 17 December 1971. It is not merely a question of taking economic action bot of avoiding, or rather minimizing, the danger of being "choked " by the avalanche of documents. The proposals made by Mr. Hubert CURIEN, Director General of the national Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique - CNRS) and published in Le Monde of 6 January 1972, according to which "brains must be recycled to prevent their sterilizing pollution by the over-accumulation of information ...", are not perhaps applicable to science alone. 3. Some Comments on the Terminology of International Documentation Information is dependent on documents, which in turn form the main part of libraries, especially international libraries. What is meant here by the term "international libraries" are the libraries of interand non-governmental organizations and their respective documentation services. To be more precise, the notion "specialized" should be added, for every international library is a specialized library , even the biggest ones with the most varied collections. In short, we are concerned with a network of libraries and of specialized international documentation services. The next point to note is that the world "documents" is used here to mean official productions of international organizations, Governments and governmental bodies, whether in the form of mimeographed documents or in that of official publications for sale. As to the notion "international" , it is obvious that any documentation service and any scientific library whatsoever is international in its collections; science knows no frontiers, so no country and no organization can adopt a system of autarchy . In this sense of the world, all scientific and specialized libraries and documentation services are international; this is the objective factor in the nature of the collection of documentation. From the institutional standpoint, however, only the documentation services and libraries of international organizations can be regarded as international. Where both factors — collection and institution — happen to coincide, we are faced with a special type of library and documentation service, that of international scientific information services. Since such services belong to international organizations, they share the organizations' tasks and responsibilities to some extent. It will be well to identify two aspects of those responsibilities which are mainly of a professional nature. In the first place an international service, while retaining its scientific initiative, is closely bound up with the requirements of the organization it serves and, in the last analysis, with the requirements of the member Governments: that is, of the international community. Secondly international documentation services must
