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
103 Specialized literature as a source of information for international organizations has two aspects which may be mentioned: firstly, information on the activities of international organizations and, secondly, information drawn from the various political, economic, scientific and other activities of the international organizations which are used as sources for the preparation of the organizations' documents. There is a mutual influence, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, between the documents of international and national organizations and those of specialized literature. This interaction should therefore be just as valid for the respective documentation services, though it must be pursued more deliberately and directly, as it is for official documents and publications. 5. Some Conclusions: Specialization and Integration of International Documentation Services: an Information Network There are certain conclusions to be drawn concerning the relationship between information and the documentation activities of international organizations. Firstly, given the increase in the number of organizations and in the volume of their publications, official and unofficial, collaboration between the documentation services of those organizations must be considered essential. The notion of a network of documentation services concerned with international affairs is steadily gaining ground. This network should be regarded as a unity of action, as a network potentially in existence already or as an integrated system of the division of labour. The term "network" should be understood to mean, not an administrative unit, but rather an integrated scientific system based on principles derived partly from the specific tasks performed by international organizations and partly from the theory and experience of scientific documentation. On the basis of such principles it would be possible to formulate a general conception of co-ordination and co-operation between international documentation services with due allowance for the independence' and specific interests of each service participating in the network. What action should be taken, how are co-ordination to be developed? What might be the specific tasks and methods of the intergovernmental and non-governmental documentation services? It would, of course, be possible to draw up a list of the questions which need answering but that is not the purpose of this study, for we feel that it is as easy to enumerate our common tasks as it is difficult to find suitable practical solutions. Simply by way of example, however, the following may be mentioned: the acquisition of official publications or official gazettes from a library that would agree to their reproduction and circulation on microfiches for the network and the regular exchange of bibliographies and unpublished documents through a sort of clearing-house. This study is inspired solely by the desire to contribute some ideas to the formulation of a general concept of co-operation between international documentation services and at the same time to raise certain questions concerning the place of these services in the world system of scientific information services.
