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

PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES OF NETWORKING IN SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION AND DOCUMENTATION IN HUNGARY 1. Raising the problem The problems of social science information and documentation (henceforward SSID) as well as some questions of its organization into networks are by and large identical with the body of knowledge and experiences generally known from the related literature. Obviously, there are also specific problems in the same way as there appear some features peculiar to every country, coming from its particular cultural standard, its traditions and the level of economic development. Therefore, the general approach to the problems of SSID will be omitted here, instead I will endeavour to point to what is peculiar to SSID in Hungary, emphasizing the practical experiences. Furthermore, despite the fact that the author of this paper may well represent the Hungarian SSID effort in more than one capacity, this is not meant to be an official statement; it is to express his personal opinion. 2. Antecedents It is not an exaggeration that the development of SSID in Hungary and its organization into network have a past of at least two decades, at least. In reality efforts to organize SSID can be traced back to the early fifties. Without going into the historical details of SSID in Hungary, it seems necessary to point to some phases of its development. In one form or another, the large social science libraries in Hungary have always carried on such activities - at least on an embryonic level — that are contemporarily known as SSID. Its forms were highly varied, and fortunately enough have remained so; the products of information were only partly regarded as documentation, in fact they were mostly routine library information services and publications. Lists of new acquisitions, current awareness cards in specific fields, thematic (special) bibliographies, selected titles of articles and similar means of information have made orientation in social science literature possible. Then, in the very beginning of the fifties, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences initiated the establishment of special documentation organizations — and this has already been a network — of which social sciences were not left out either. The main emphasis even then was laid upon the natural sciences and technology. A central institution, the National Documentation Centre and two specialized documentation centres (for the social sciences) were set up: namely, the Economic Documentation Centre and the Documentation Centre for Literary Studies. Of the