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

28 mathematical logic). These results gradually penetrate into social sciences, improving research possibilities and methods, promoting the development of new fields of research in the control, organization and registration of social-economic life (e.g. planometry). The application of mathematics, mathematical logic, mathematical statistics and cybernetics, the introduction of concrete sampling methods and models, attempts at and experiments in quantification are becoming more and more characteristic also of the social sciences. In this connection, scientific information in the social sciences — to which it belongs — proceeds in the direction outlined above. Thus scientific information has a two-fold significance: it is an integral part of certain areas of the social sciences which have a direct bearing on the development of the productive forces and it is a social-scientific activity affecting all the sciences. From this second aspect it follows that scientific information has to be approached as a problem of social sciences and according to economic and science policy categories. The technological and scientific revolution gave a new impact to the development of the social sciences and consequently to the development of social-scientific information. This statement has a qualitative and a quantitative aspect, both being connected with the increase of specialized literature, documents and data, with information in general. 3. An approach to the efficiency of information work, with special regards to the social sciences Generally speaking, it could be said that at least two factors of efficiency of information work are known. The first one is to have well organized libraries. They should be interconnected to form a network. This is the basis of all kind of information activities. The second one is the improvement of research guides, information manuals

, the main problem of being informed today, is to know "how to find". The acquisition of information in the social sciences is an integral part of the research. No bibliographic, abstracting or documentation service can replace the information investigation made by the social researcher himself. These services could provide extremely valuable assistance but their role is not to be compared with similar services in natural sciences and engineering (e.g. Chemical Abstracts or Chemical Titles in chemistry). Many information services are doing their best for social science research on the one hand, and important reference literature, like research methodologies, bibliographical surveys, introductory manuals in various branches of social sciences are given some orientation to research, on the other hand. What is to be developed are introductory information manuals for research ("information propaedeutics") for different branches of the social sciences. By information manuals, we understand a special type of reference manual combining some aspects of the "traditional" reference works (e.g. bibliographies, list of periodicals) and those of research methodologies. The main task of this new type of information manual is, to provide a general and systematical survey of a certain branch of social science, an overview on its institutions