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)

I. The socio-professional aspects of the development of the scientific information with special regard to social sciences

INSTITUTIONAL MATURITY AND SOME SOCIO-PROFESSIONAL ASPECTS OF AUTOMATED DOCUMENTATION One of the most inciting new aspects that ameliorate the services on the ever growing number of written information (books, documents, periodicals, research reports, etc.) is automated documentation: one of the most important fields in the realm of information science. There are many achievements in this field, most in science and technology (and management), but they are also in social sciences (e.g. data banks). However, there is a gap in the application of automated documentation between these two great branches of knowledge. And this is quite adequate. Science and engineering have, for the most part, an experimental character within which basic, applied and development research can be distinguished. Their information and data have an objective character, and the time factor (speed) plays an important role in acquisition of scientific information. In development research the results can be directly measured economically. The speed factor and the quantity of data requires the use of automated processing. As the social sciences have less of an experimental character, their results in the different branches again vary in immediate practical applicability (historical sciences and humanities, on the one hand, and concrete organizational and administrative branches, on the other). The information data have to bear an ideological aspect. In general, the demand for retrospective research is greater. The speed factor in acquiring data is not important. The information task in social sciences is, to a large extent, an integral part of the work of the researcher himself. The automated processing of information is not so pressing as in science and technology and requires some specific approaches. Nonetheless no strict demarcation line can be drawn between these two large fields of science in their use of automated documentation. The distinctive features enumerated above afford a certain basis of differentiation. Most of the studies on informatics in general and on automated documentation in particular, treat the question how to act, what are the problems of the techniques, programming, etc. In fact, the basic question of automated documentation is either what is to be done or why do it, and upon the answer of this question comes the know-how. It is not the automation technology which determines the concept of the automated documentation. On the contrary: from the concept the adequate technology or the technology "to measure" should derive. Under the notion of automated documentation, I mean a mechanized system which works through a chain of self-regulated procedures and without direct human intervention. At the same time it should serve and express the complexity of programs and services of libraries and documentation units, with special regard to the information storage and retrieval.