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
158 What really counts is not the number, small or large, of the United Nations information systems but their fundamental interrelations and the rational division of labour among them. All this is involved in policy and management which form the subject of the following chapter. III. How is information managed by the United Nations? Management, in fact, must follow from a policy. For the time being, however, no information policy exists for the United Nations system as a whole, or more precisely, what exists is a quasi-policy, and consequently a quasi-management of information. Any leading body related to development and to the socio-economic activities of the Organization, has no "mandate" to formulate or conduct a policy for the United Nations family on information and its management. There are committees, working groups, task forces etc. for co-ordination the information policies of the UN family, but there does not exist any high-level body or office (department, division) with authority which is directly responsible for tackling the problems of information. Many years after having been formulated, the statement in the Jackson-report is still valid: each of the organic services of the United Nations, and some specialized institutions, plans and administers its own programmes without worrying particularly about the programmes of other bodies." 2 2 The highest body for policy, management and co-ordination in the United Nations system is the Administrative Committee on Co-ordination (ACC) reporting to the Economic and Social Council. A subsidiary body of the ACC is the Inter-Organization Board for Information and related activities. But even if it were possible to consider ACC/IOB as a leading body for information, an important potential group of information institutions would not fit into the picture: the United Nations libraries whose activities are not even formally co-ordinated. A real power to co-ordinate consists in financing power. Such a co-ordinating body doesn't exist in UN system for information and libraries. Another consideration, which is connected with the former, lies in the fact that attempts at information policy are not properly linked to the social-economic development activities, to the R&D policy of the UN. Policy, decision-making and management of information within the United Nations has to be concentrated, then integrated with the development policy, finally co-ordinated in conjunction with financial decision-making power. National experiences show also that without such a concentration, integration and financing , any attempt at co-ordination remains wishful thinking. The scheme of the existing situation is self-explanatory: decision-making, financing, management on the one hand, supervising, reporting on the other are separated, and the United Nations libraries are not connected with the other information services. Special mention can be made of the lack of policy on the United Nations libraries. In 1946, the Economic and Social Council designated the Headquarters Library to
