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
INTERNATIONAL CO OPERATION AND TRENDS IN SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION TRANSFER Co-author: Tamás Földi Introduction One of the most important discoveries of the last decade — significant beyond science itself — is the perception that it may be fatal for mankind to lose control of the negative consequences of the overall scientific and technical development, e.g. the impending exhaustion of energy sources and raw materials, overpopulation, the harm of urbanization, pollution of the environment, acute food shortages, and the ever increasing and costly production of nuclear weapons and missiles. All these are so-called global questions. The natural and technological sciences can merely offer a partial answer, providing as it were the means only to master these problems, the solutions of which are essentially of a social character. This perception has also contributed to the increasing significance of the social sciences and their proponents, and partly explains the increasing interest in social science information. The inter— and/or multidisciplinary character of the aforementioned global questions, including the new economic order, technical assistance to developing countries, etc., points to a complexity requiring increasingly more information. In several countries, e.g. in France and Hungary among others, 1 special teams have been set up to develop and co-ordinate social science information/ Information transfer is particularly significant for developing countries, having small populations and languages outside the linguistic main-stream; theirs is normally a flexible economic, scientific and cultural framework. These countries cannot be self-sufficient in the field of information; rather they must consciously utilize the widening possibilities emerging from the transfer of information. But this article is not concerned with oldest and, at the same time, the most permanent form of information transfer, i.e. immediate, written and oral communication between scholars. Traditions of the international information transfer can be traced back to the exchange of publications by libraries as early as the 18th century, 3 to international inter-library lending, to the reciprocal supplying of bibliographic information, and to co-operation in international abstracting and indexing of journals. 4 So the current information transfer is not unprecedented yet it has rather a new quality, with a greater dimension of co-operation than before. There are national initiatives underlying the global scientific and social questions. These are aimed at co-ordinating national and international social science information channels. There are political considerations of détente, too, a concept borrowed from international politics and here applied to international information transfer.
