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
ON SOME CRITERIA OF INFORMATION TRANSFER The European Association of Information Service (EUSIDIC) was founded in 1970 for the purposes of information development by computers. It is now in the service of online information with a scope wider than Europe. It is not frequent that a conference would bring together many intellectually strong as well as well funded institutions, although the two types of strengths are not mutually exclusive. There can be a concordance as the Conference of EUSIDIC 1 in Bled has shown. Online The conference was organised by the Slovenian Information Centre, Ljubljana, 2 on an impressive scale. Those taking part were: giant concerns or databank owning agencies, academical institutions such as: Shell, I.C.I. , Lockheed, Systems Development Corporation, Chemical Abstracts, Electricité de France, Institute Français du Petrole, Unilever, Unesco, International Atomic Energy Agency, International Scientific Information Agency (Moscow), the Dutch National Library, CNRS-INFORMASCIENCE , the Polish Academy's Information Centre, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Among the COMECON countries the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary took part for the first time in the conference the importance of .which was emphasized by EUSIDIC organisers. No doubt it showed the possibilities of opening up an East European market. What was on offer? A certain product called scientific information which is marketed by top level salesmanship, or rather, which is being transmitted from the producer to the consumer with the help of computers, undersea cables, space satellites with man-machine interaction. All these need great technical and financial investment (databanks, information channels) as well as increased intellectual capacities in information to develop interfacing. This explains the presence in EUSIDIC of organisations such as Shell and Lockheed, or bureaux dealing with software such as the Schweizerische Institut für Technische Information or the Dutch National Library. The latter's experience is particularly interesting as its reference service has been online for years where experts assist the clients for a small fee. In other words it has an information/reference service which is based on a library.
