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

55 During the sixties, SS1D activities were increasingly intensified in several big social science libraries and also in the information services of the Academy's research institutes. The political consolidation in Hungary in the sixties and the related economic upswing induced an increase of interest in social science literature. The international situation had also a favourable effect in the same direction. Various cooperative efforts were made to satisfy the growing interest mentioned, but it appeared before long that the greater the possibilities of SSID to satisfy this interest, the more increasing were the autharchic tendencies within the institutions. In other words, the more favourable possibilities were not followed by their equally favourable exploitation. The sometimes peaceful, sometimes discordant coexistence of cooperative and autharchic tendencies have benn characteristic of SSID networking in Hungary up to now. 4. Causes affecting adversely SSID networking It was in the early seventies when the cultural government authorities — which have been acting up to date as the nation-wide professional supervising body of library affairs - found that time had come to develop and organize SSID into a network on the principle of centralization. To achieve this, a secretariat, made up of a few experts, was set up within the Centre of Library Science and Methodology. This secretariat partly organized surveys, partly made efforts to bring together the libraries concerned. This activity could be considered ground-work if only because during this work the introduction of up-to-date information technology the use of computers for SSID was already proposed. In addition, the rather active Hungarian participation in international SSID efforts had made its effect felt in the related Hungarian works from the beginning. Among these are several years' work in ICSSD (within the so-called Meyriat-Committee), and activities in FID/C3, the shorter or longer work of some Hungarian experts within international professional organizations, and so forth. All this resulted in the tendency to increase interest in SSID - which had commenced as early as the sixties taking a more palpable shape. It should also be noted here that the new economic mechanism (reform of economic control) — which is still going on in these days — has increased the "hunger for information" in general, and within this the requirements were set for SSID. At the same time there came about a singular situation: simultaneously with centralization-minded conceptions and cooperations developed, there were also decentralization-oriented conceptions, following from the economic reform, which were contrary to cooperation and coordination. According to this, the institutions were supposed to provide for their own information to which they were supplied with appropriate financial means, (thus they were inclined to cooperation — i.e. networking —) to the extent as they felt it to be in their own interest. So, why would any institution, having all financial, organizational, personnel and other possibilities for complete independence, feel it necessary to cooperate with others? Why would it give up any of its total or virtual independence if not necessary? This question may well be put both in the case of people and of institutions. Indeed, certain coordination secretariats