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

54 latter two, the Economic Documentation Centre lived longer to merge later, during the second half of the fifties, with the Library of the University of Economics. A minor part of its functions was taken over by the then newly founded Documentation Services of the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The above mentioned institutions were engaged in several activities which were not covered by libraries at the time. Thus, for instance, they were dealing with such works as the Hungarian translation of UDC and its introduction to a number of special institutions, the registration of translations and translation from foreign special literature, the preparation of digests and analytical reviews. In the Cold War years, all this had its own particular significance, but these early documentation works did not only give the specialists an insight into Western scientific literature, but they also had their uses from quite another aspect: they provided to a considerable extent, direct access to Soviet literature, necessitated by a lack of knowledge of the Russian language. Set up early and ceased too early, this documentation organization started, even if in an immature form, what is now called networking. This networking was not based on a division of labour; it was rather an initiative to help the services of special documentation centres reach the users through other institutions as well. Therefore, relations were established and a sort of methodological guidance and exchange of experiences were developed among the institutions concerned, and they mutually took over and exchanged their respective documentation services. 3. Beginning of the SSID networking After World War II two principles became predominant right at the beginning in the organization of the slowly recovering Hungarian library life. One, was the unity of library affairs, meaning that both special and public libraries were understood to be part of a uniform national library system or network. The other was the network principle itself, which groups the libraries of various types or working under the supervision of various national bodies either from the aspect of administration (maintenance) or from that of subject fields (e.g. economics, law, etc.). Thus the starting points for networking in SSID were given even from a legal viewpoint. However, as shown by the Hungarian experiences, it is easier to regulate something legally — networking in this case - than to give it meaningful content and run it efficiently. At the end of the fifties, a collaboration among three institutions resulted in a Hungarian documentary publication in the social sciences which was the first to be based on real cooperation and which, in many respects, already bore the signs of up-to-date documentation. The title of this publication was "Közgazdasági és Statisztikai Irodalmi Tájékoztató" (Information on Economic and Statistical Literature), edited jointly by the University of Economics, Central Statistical Office and the Library of the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and published by a professional publisher, the Publishing House for Economic and Legal Literature. This periodical was in fact stopped because of its having been in deficit.