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 CONNECTIONS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF CO OPERATIONS IN STOCKBUILDING 1. Some general points Due to the expansion of professional literature comprehensive Stockbuilding became illusory. This is true for countries as well as for institutions. Some approaches: 1) Goethe's dictum whereby national literatures will add up to a world literature at the end of the 20th century relates to information in the sense that it has by origin and use a world-wide character. 2) If the information has a world-wide character then its source the primary literature needs an international approach. 3) The approach is based on multiple experiences of many years. There isn't one definite way but there are several possible ways. 4) These can be categorised into two camps: centralised and decentralised Stockbuilding. The British Library Document Supply Centre belongs to the first, the SCANDIAplan to the second category. 5) Economical and political development indicate integration too, see the regional co-operations, the multinationals or the agencies under the U.N. Even information is integrative in tendency. 6) Within this tendency there are differences which crystallise both by scientific fields and by certain publications. 2. Stockbuilding and information The world-wide character of information is evident in the physical and technical sciences and less evident in the social sciences and humanities. The first recognise no political or ideological boundaries, and such restrictions that there are, relate to the different types of culture in some countries. There is no sense, for instance, in building luxory cars for countries without hard surface roads or export pigs to countries where they don't eat their meat. Among the humanities certain branches are national in character e.g. history of literature. Yet, in principle, the use of such literature has no limits, the information generated by it may be of international interest. In order to represent national literature on an international level each country should build up a body of reference literature — on a-shared basis. Within this framework, large catalogues, such as that of the Library of Congress should appear alongside bibliographical checklists of national or international character. National registers, lists of addresses, centralised catalogues are means to guide the reader to primary literature.