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
122 ECSSID 2, supported by Unesco, was held at Blazejevko, Poznan (Poland) in October 1978, organized by the Polish focal point, the Department of Scientific Information of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Specialists from twenty-two countries and seven international organizations were present. 9 Its recommendations gave a precise definition of the objectives and range of activities of the project, as well as of the means of achieving the objectives; it also defined the joint responsibilities of the Vienna Centre and the national focal points (for example the Vienna Centre is responsible for the coordination of IOC activities, working groups and joint research projects of the programme, while the national bodies are responsible for the granting of fellowships or exchange of specialists); it established certain rules of procedure for the IOC; recommended that the national focal points provide the maximum material and financial support possible; stressed the necessity of having national focal points in each participating country. The conference also adopted the programme of activities for 1979/80. ECSSID 3 was held in Bad Hennef (FRG) in 1981, while the 4th ECSSID was in Athens in 1984. Working groups and publications The bulk of ECSSID activities are carried out within the working groups and find expression in publications. East-West co-operation applies to the topics, to the experts, and also to the locations of meetings. Let me note that, in my opinion, two groups of activities are proceeding within ECSSID which can be qualified as specific both as regards their content and regional character: education and training in social science informatics, and tasks related with the building up of computerized social science data bases, or rather the application of informatics in social sciences on the widest scale possible. These are the very fields in which ECSSID can now produce the most novelties, but in this case, too, it relies heavily on existing programmes, national and international. Working Group 1 is engaged in the regional extension of the exchange of primary and secondary documents. While this is the most traditional form of co-operation, it also has the greatest potentials which are to be explored and activated. Working Group 2 deals with the exchange of information on ongoing research. Although Unesco and the Smithsonian Institution arranged a large-scale conference in the last quarter of 1975 in Paris on the worldwide exchange of information in this field, this being an important issue on the agenda of various European meetings, and organizational efforts have been made to promote regional co-operation, the results so far are rather meagre. The related programme, coordinated by the Dutch focal point, SWIDOC, is a step forward, although the planned first report — due perhaps to the delicate nature of the topic — will hardly cover all the European countries. 1 0 The scope of Working Group 3 ranges from the intellectual tools (e.g. thesauri) needed for computerized data bases to the exchange of magnetic tapes. Various actions are proceeding in parallel and results can hardly be expected in the immediate future. Achieving compatibility of linguistic tools, terminologies, and different systems
