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)

III. „The elephant’s head” and integrated information infrastructure for developing countries

156 their multifaceted subjects, they are sector/discipline-oriented systems in character. All of them are or can be based on several disciplines, at the same time they are concentrated on one main field of a well-defined sector such as agriculture, industry, and so forth. Unlike the mission-oriented system of horizontal character, these sectoral systems aim at a vertical coverage

. This is not to imply any judgement of value between the two major types of operational systems, the only difference between them lies in their respective basic orientation. (c) Normative systems/programmes are non-operational in character as opposed to their mission-oriented or sector/discipline-oriented counterparts, instead they are acting on a normative basis. They are not providing information for any research "clientele", their "clientele" being composed of other information systems and library services. An appropriate example for this is the UNISIST which is an "effort to synthetize, at the international level, diverse philosophies, programmes, and policies related to the international exchange of information .. .".

2

0 But UNISIST is also a policy "related to the international exchange of information" that initiates, within its framework, other systems like the ISDS with a normative element for the standardized identification of periodicals and serials. Normative systems have to play a very important role in the implementation of standardized methods, techniques, to make different systems compatible, thus promoting the harmonization and integration of information policy. (2) Other aspects of categorization (a) By purposes ("clientele"): - government, policy and management-oriented (including development) (e.g. UNBIS) - research-oriented (e.g. INIS) - direct application-oriented (e.g. INDIS, INPADOC/WIPO patent documentation) - service-oriented (e.g. INFOTERRA) (b) By input: - specialized literature (e.g. AGRIS) - non-published material (e.g. INIS) - official documents (e.g. UNBIS) or by the combination of the three elements; (c) By output: — indices, bibliographies (e.g. UNBIS) - abstracts (e.g. INIS, AGRIS) or by the combination of these two elements; (d) By geographical coverage: - concerning a country - concerning a region - being on a world scale;