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
38 Sándor Szalai, a sociologist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences thus formulated these phenomena as the main types of interdisciplinary researches. 1 There are small-span researches in which neighbouring, closely connected branches of science and scholarship are participating such as legal science, economics, and so forth. Then there are medium-span interdisciplinary researches such as those connected with public health or urbanization. Finally there are immensely broad-span researches like the above-mentioned space research, which call for the participation of disciplines which until now have been almost completely separate, having quite different conceptual, organizational and institutional systems, and have had hardly any intercommunication. Such are, for instance, astronomy and psychology, optics and microbiology, and so on. Formerly, until about the Second World War, one could see the development of borderline sciences. However, the recent development can no longer be characterized simply by borderline researches (e.g. biology and chemistry, which gave birth to an independent new branch: biochemistry), much rather can it be characterized by interdisciplinary researches, not caring a fig for the traditional classification or systematization. "Interdisciplinarity " itself is a process of integrative character. And all these have their own impact on information. The process of change in the scientific approach that is going on in research and development in the direction of the integration of knowledge, should make its effect felt on information too. From the aspect of orientation , the following main types of information may be discerned in scientific information: Information system oriented by the kinds of documents as for instance, the information system of non-published documents of on-going research, or patent documentation, or a UNDEX, the bibliographical control system of UN documents. The discipline-oriented information system is the most wide-spread. Practically every branch of research and development has its own traditional and/or automated system (for instance Referativni Zhurnal of the VINITI). Mission-oriented information systems are essentially the systems of such interdisciplinary researches or projects as space research, environment protection, development science (problems of the developing countries), science of science, or informatics that cannot be classed in one discipline. 2 Presumably, we will be or rather we already are witnessing a developmental tendency in the course of which alongside with the mentioned various "oriented " information systems there will also be an information service which is characterized by the synthesis or a high-level, expert summary of the given subject field. Can these services be termed as being synthesis-oriented, от rather as research based information ? But it is not the term but the tendency that really counts. What does this tendency express? On the one hand, information synthesis is a response to the fragmentation caused by the specialization of information, sort of a scientific reply, a quasiency elope die headword concerning a certain scientific problem or theme. In other words, it tends to express the integrative tendency of information that is adequate to the interdisciplinary trend in research and development. On the other
