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
128 the U.N. Library then. Later we met several times: in Budapest, in Vienna, and in Geneva. He was a warm and open man, who used to work for the League of Nations, opposed the Nazis, and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He first informed me that: "documentation is library work, badly done." Whether he had meant it or not, the position of the U.N. Library in 1969 was oozing of that mentality. Conservation prevailed. Breycha-Vauthier had already retired from his post in Geneva and worked as an Austrian diplomat in the Near East. The U.N. library staff had a reverence for the hierarchy. When, at an occasion of his Geneva visit I received him immediately, he admonished me. Who is so approachable - my visitor was saying - risks that others might think that he has little to do. It was a mistake to leave the Library without a head for 5 years, but at length V. Winspeare-Guicciardi, the Deputy Secretary General of the U.N. decided to act. The Library needed a director because the morale was low, and professionally it was in a critical condition. The two depend on one another: there were personnel and personality problems I need not detail, but there were problems which I can summarise. Human relations, conceptual, organisational questions, points of initiatives, budgetary and staff problems. The atmosphere was not very good to start with: factions, inner clashes and the like. The Library's reputation was at stake; the interregnum had brought increased insecurity. The staff — recruited from 18 different nations — was dismissed. There was no long term perspective to work towards, partly because the Library lacked initiative so its users did not put their trust in it. The U.N. directorate itself seemed to put up with a day to day existence. The difficulties were increased by a lack of organisation and the routine. Although there were individual job descriptions, there was no organisational rule and only intermittant guidance for the use of the collections. The Dag Hammarskjold Library (DHL) in New York took the lion's share of the library service budget. The U.N. Library in Geneva was the poor relation, and to some extent it still is. Despite efforts under my directorship the Geneva Library remained underdeveloped both financially and staffwise. The promises, in the main, remained promises. There was no budgetary provision for instance for official missions although some 2000 dollars were available due to the generosity of the U.N. Deputy Secretary General. This proved advantageous to New York DHL as well. It could be left to Geneva to represent the U.N. in European conferences. Promotions had been neglected. This ill has largely been cured: new people were selected for new posts - documentation, reference work - but my choices weren't always lucky ones. My superior — who was very helpful all the time — had given me a free hand in recruiting. The Library of the conference city Geneva is a conference city ever since the time of the League of Nations. Housed in the Palais des Nations the Library expresses this characteristic and, no doubt, it is
