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

"TO CONNECT THE COUNTRY'S MIND WITH THE NATION'S HEART " — Reading and information — Claude Levi-Strauss said, during an interview with the French periodical "Lire" that the Library will command primary interest for the ethnologist of the third millennium as something that retains the best of our civilisation and can say the most for the future. The French scholar had considered that a library would be the best placed for transmitting the world culture for the future. He mentioned the Library of Congress as the institution. The question posed was what feature of life might make the deepest impression on French science, thinking and culture. It's unlikely that Levi-Strauss was wrong. At all probability it is the library which will integrate the knowledge of the present for future use. Other institutions might have a say too but the library's role, its position is optimal. Antal Szerb one of Hungary's prominent men of letters said, recalling his Paris trip between the two wars, that "it was good to be anywhere in Paris but most of all in the Bibliothèque Nationale". In a debate between Lunacharski - a leading figure of the theory and practice of socialist culture — and Chuskovski, extolling the virtues of the ideal revolutionary, the latter's hero said: "Should you have to burn Dante at the stake in order to win the victory for freedom - don't hesitate." But Lunacharski retorted: "Revolution is not an aim — it has never been. It is the means to an end. The means of creating a harmonious culture, something to nurture human strength and beauty." The 18th century encyclopaedists: Diderot, D'Alembert and their associates had already based their great work on the assumption that men are equal, so are their countries, consequently knowledge was for everyone. How? The answer was: by reading. May I add: with the help of libraries. But isn't the traditional form of reading and the library out of date today, in the age that the Viewdata system links up the telephone with the computer for information and entertainment? Hardly so. The users of databases - which had been built up in the last decade for scientific information - were and are the scientific and special libraries. Libraries took the lion's share in the introduction and spread of bibliographical data-culture. These databases yield information on special literature (with its varied forms, retrospective searches) while the texts of the literature itself is provided by libraries. We can, therefore, speak of primary (text) or secondary (bibliographical) information. The Viewdata system is able to connect the primary with the secondary information for mass communication (TV programmes, video-news) and link that up with general and practical information such as weather reports and timetables. The system may be regarded as the library coming to the home.