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

MAKING USE OF INTERDISCIPLINARY INFORMATION: THE HUNGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, established in 1825, is the country's highest scientific authority. It acts as scientific adviser to the government, operates one of its most significant network of 45 research institutes from virtually all branches of science, and also finances and controls a number of researches at universities. Its information centre is the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, one of the most important scientific information bases of the country. Both the Academy and its Library are the creator, organizer and disseminator of interdisciplinary information. 1. Historical background The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was set up in 1826, only a year after the establishment of the Academy itself. Preceding the II. World War it has already become one of the three most important libraries of the country, and from 1948, together with the library-information units of the Academy's network of research institutes (comprising 45 institutions) it became the largest scientific information base in Hungary with the widest spectrum: it owned 2.5 million bibliographic units and 9 thousand current periodicals representing almost all branches of science. The information network of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is very wide in scope and has many aspects. This variety reflects on the one hand the wide spectrum of the Academy's research work, on the other, the degree of integration in information evolved during the course of historical development. This integration consists of the unity of the library — archives — automated information and its interdisciplinary character represented by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This Library is the center of the information network of the HAS. The Library of the HAS has been developed into an information centre in its widest sense. Into this centre have been chronologically integrated with the library the Archives of the Academy and the Natural Sciences Information Directorate, established later, and being engaged in computerized SDI and science analysis (scientometrics). As part of the process of continuous broadening of library tasks, preliminary studies are being conducted with international collaboration to build up a computerized data base for the social sciences.