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

45 d. provision of central scientific information services, such as science of science, research management, science policy (23 volumes of its journal have been published so far); e. publication activities based on the library's own collections with the cooperation of its personnel (series such as "Publications", "Informatics and Science Analysis", catalogues of the Department of Manuscripts); f. the collection of non-book and non-periodical type material such as the Archives of the Academy operating as an independent department with its archive-, tape- and photographic collections; g. the introduction of up-to-date information technologies, such as micrography, offset reprography, xerography and alike; h. and last but not least the modernisation of information techniques, which started up a few years ago with the SDI services based on the magnetic tapes of the Science Citation Index. All these, and others not mentioned, are user needs centred or user oriented services, manifested functionally as integration, and in contents as interdisciplinarity (a question of terminology, as the phenomenon could equally be called multi- or pluri-disciplinarity). The items under a—h. have a common characteristic: all reflect in a more or less direct form the institutional or personal research need. 3. Some characteristics of interdisciplinary information As I mentioned before, the HAS and its Library (or through its Library) is the creator ("generator"), organizer and disseminator of interdisciplinary information. Data specified in the previous chapter outline chiefly the research-user requirements represented by the Academy, and the items of the programme aimed at satisfying these requirements by the library. But we have to proceed further than that. The Academy does not only represent interdisciplinary interests but is itself an interdisciplinary institution (its present 10 scientific departments embrace all disciplines) and the majority of the results of researches conducted by its network of institutions is being published by its own publishing house, the Publishing House of the HAS in its periodicals, series and monographic studies. It issues over a hundred periodicals, approximately half of these in foreign languages ("Acta"-s), and partly in cooperation with major international publishers (Elsevier, Pergamon, etc.). A number of these serials are distinctly interdisciplinary in character, as for example "Scientometrics" (its editorial office is in the Library of the Academy, its publishers are Elsevier and the Publishing House of the HAS). The Library of the Academy, like the Academy itself, also represents, or rather accomplishes this interdisciplinarity through its structure, collections and services (see 2. chapter, items a—h.). The Library is presently an information establishment which is integrated in its organization, interdisciplinary in its character, and combines the functions of the conventional library, archives and computerized information as well. It is a general library (tradition retains its name "library" without indicating an information