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

24 research surveys etc.) are not nearly in proportion with the quality and quantity of new information contained within them. This is not unknown to researchers. They say in conversations or in seminars that secondary information is useful only to a limited extent. They keep track of selected periodicals, they are interested in the range of books from which to select but often are indifferent or just occasionally interested in secondary information. Various sciences make out in various ways, chemistry, for instance is "information-hungry." The users of secondary information, in the main, are other scientific information centres. One should add, however, that the phenomenon of the restricted use of secondary material is manifested differently in different fields. While, for instance, the historian or the literary historian regards bibliography as their bread and butter a construction engineer is not interested in it. As for reference information or current awareness communications these are like adverts for washing powders (excuse the comparison) whose labels are different but whose contents are about the same. A change of aspect The argument above may seem negative and to a certain extent it is. What should scientific information services need, is there a model for them? No one article can answer this question but one might attempt a list of experimental thoughts: — there is no general model for scientific information; — all information activity relies on the collections and services of a library - these have to be developed, above all; — scientific information services are the best users of secondary information; — in certain fields the role of secondary information in scientific development is in need of démystification; — emphasis should be laid on direct syntheses such as "state of arts" reports; — information scientists are members of research teams: their efforts to re-package information may seem important so long as the information will become immediately accessible; — computers and information systems ought to be interlinkable; — the basis of all computer based information systems is organisational maturity which includes personnel; — the so called information explosion is limitable by a gradual and international reorganisation of primary publications. About the double Winnie the Pooh effect While the arguments of this article can hardly be summed up in mathematical formulae it may be paraphrased by two features in Milne's Winnie the Pooh. The two scenes seem to manifest the meaning of scientific information - the "double Winnie the Pooh effect."