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

RESEARCH AND SSID SERVICES, TENDENCIES AND CHARACTERISTICS IV. ECSSID Conf. Athens, 21-24. October 1984. Co-author: Jiri Zahradil 1. A few words about the classification of and in the social sciences The concept of the social sciences is interpreted in different ways, which makes it necessary to give at least the broad outlines of what we mean by the social sciences. There is no doubt, of course, that they deal with the development and history of human society and man's place in it. Nevertheless, it is by no means an easy task to name each particular branch belonging to the social sciences. To illustrate the difficulties of classification - and as an interesting case - let's take the example of history. In his time Marx believed that history was "the only real science". In the sixties, however, at a UNESCO special experts' conference, some of the excellent social scientists who took part in the conference (Lazarsfeld, Piaget etc.), had a heated debate on what history really meant. One of the opinions was that considering history we cannot in fact talk about a branch of science, but a dimension (one of the preparatory conferences of the so-called Auger-report on the social sciences). According to western interpretation, the branches that belong to the social sciences are only those, that study society specifically, such as economics, sociology, political science, law and public administration, and so on, whereas philosophy, history, psychology and other branches of science that form human consciousness, belong to the humanities. In the socialist countries by social sciences we mean a complexity of knowledge that comprises humanities as well. So the nomenclature of the social sciences in these countries includes — without the list being complete — the theoretical aspects of socialism, philosophy, economics, sociology, statistics, demography, history (including archaeology, the history of art and ethnography), political science, linguistics, the study of literature, pedagogy and the theoretical problems of culture. Concerning the problems of classification, we should mention the revision of social science classification that has been carried out in east-west UDC cooperation under FID C/3 for 25 years and the thesaurus studies made by ECSSID, in order to throw light on the problems of "what belongs where " and "how to interpret things " from the point of view of SSID. UNESCO, both in its activity and structure, differentiates between the social sciences and the humanities, and so does the International Bibliography of Social Sciences, the most important international bibliographic venture sponsored by UNESCO.