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
69 for example, manuscripts and archival materials in the study of history or literature. Other primary, non-written sources can be found in archaeology too, for example buildings, various objects of historical interest or the remains of skeletons. Of course most of these sources themselves have been discovered with the help of previously made descriptions, maps or other written material. As further examples of sources of information we should mention various objects of art or objects of artistic value such as the cave drawings of Altamira or the scrolls of the Dead Sea, that had to be deciphered by scientists. Sound recordings and folk song recordings are particularly important documents in ethnography, whereas recorded speeches and audiovisual material in general are valuable documents in the study of history. Several branches of the social sciences rely, for their research, on data-oriented information such as statistical books, surveys, data archives and so on. The source-orientation of different branches of the social sciences is shown below: Branch of science Orientation (combinations) history in general a. b, с history of art b, a archaeology b. a, с economics in general a. b, с political economy a, с business economics c, a banking c, a sociology a, с philosophy a. с, b law a, с, b literature a linguistics c, с, b In practice the different source-orientations are never manifest in a chemically pure form. The source of research is sometimes one source and sometimes another one, or different sources at the same time. We have so far pointed out the three main functions of the social sciences (ideological function, exploration of social reality, preparation for decision making). We have also discussed the three main source-orientations in social science research (special literature-orientation, factographic-orien tation and data-orientation). Considering these two basic factors from the point of view of SSID, we may trace the process of the diffusion of scientific information in cognition. 5. The three phases in the cycle of cognition in research and the SSID Without trying to suggest that the number three has some kind of cabbalistic force, it seems that after the three functions, the three historical periods and the three main
