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
110 ECSSID In addition to the aforementioned international social science information organizations, mention should also be made of the regional European Conference on Social Science Information and Documentation. 1 7 ECSSID was initiated by the European Co-ordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences (the Vienna Centre), but the information transfer activities of ECSSID extend beyond Europe to North America. The first ECSSID conference was held in Moscow in 1977 and another in Blazejevko-Poznan, Poland, in 1978. Between conferences, four working groups of the International Organizing Committee of ECSSID direct policy and co-operation matters. The competence of the working groups is as follows: Working Group 1 is concerned with the exchange of primary and secondary documents on social science; Working Group 2 with the exchange of information on ongoing research; Working Group 3, the compatibility of automated information systems; and Working Group 4, education and training. The increasing number of organs engaged in the field of social information transfer points to an intensified international co-operation in this field. Computerized information transfer in the social sciences Computer systems tend to intensify information transfer in general, and international social science information transfer in particular. Among such international information systems mention should be made of: Unesco's operational DARE (social sciences) and experimental SPINES (science policy); 1 8 in the field of labour, ISIS (Integrated Science Information System) of ILO in conjunction with other competent organizations in this field; DEVSIS (Development Science Information System), 1 9 under the auspices of IDRC, ILO, OECD, the United Nations, UNDP and Unesco. The significant national science automated data bases - e.g. in France, FRANCIS (social science and humanities), in the United States ERIC (education) and the Social Science Citation Index — are in fact international in coverage, thereby forming part of global information transfer. In small and medium-size countries, one of the central dilemmas of information policy concerns the linking up with international computer systems. These countries must consider whether the traditional self-sufficiency in information practice can remain satisfactory in the future. The countries that decide to participate in international cooperation must answer still further questions. How should they choose from among existing, often parallel, systems? Is it advisable to join several systems at the same time? If so, and taking into account the frequent lack of compatibility among such systems, how should the link-up avoid straining the participants at both the input and output end? How can an institute about to link up with a national and/or international system be modified in order to meet the requirements of input tasks and output receiving? What is the optimal advisable proportion of co-operation with international information
