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

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCHES AND INFORMATION SYNTHESES Informatics may essentially be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, informatics may be understood as a highly comprehensive and complex concept of the theory and practice of scientific information. This embraces the totality of activities involving library, documentation and the automation of information. Secondly, informatics may be regarded as a general application of cybernetics. As understood in the first case, information syntheses are ranking among the new trends of informatics. These have been strongly developing over the past fifteen years. This development has been influenced considerably by the information needs of interdisciplinary researches. At the same time, this type of reserach work expresses the integrative tendency as against the high degree of specialization of research and development. With some exaggeration, though, it may well be stated that a good part of the really effective contemporary research efforts is interdisciplinary in character. It is a new phenomenon that the interdisciplinary trend as it appears within the large scientific spheres — sciences, social science and the humanities - will increasingly prevail among these spheres. The individual disciplines of these spheres will intersect, will melt in each other. To be mentioned among scores of instances is the protection of natural environment that involves — among others — biology, geography, medicine, technology, politics, economics, sociology, social-psychology, or prognostics as an integrated social science research that adopts mathematical methods, too, but to be quoted as simpler example are mathematical linguistics, ergonomy, and scientometrics. It is by far no news that there is a partnership between literary science and linguistics since they have always used each other's achievements, their research works have been intertwined. Connected with the development of sociology, there appeared the sociology of literature, as well. However, these "intersections" have been seen only within the sphere of social sciences and humanities. Different is the situation in the case of mathematical linguistics, computerized translation or lexicography which cannot be imagined without the involvement of the sciences. Generally, the spread of the large-scale adoption of mathematical methods in scientific spheres other than natural sciences have had a strong effect on the development of interdisciplinary researches. But there are also certain branches of science that have not become, but were precisely born to be interdisciplinary studies. In addition to the above-mentioned environment protection, such study is space research which came into being by the agency of mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, biology, medicine, nutrition (or dietetics), psychology, telecommunication, metallurgy and of a wide range of other disciplines that cannot even be enumerated.