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

70 source-orientations of the social sciences, we shall now study the three phases in the cycle of cognition in research from the point of view of SSID. We believe that the cycle of cognition can be divided into three phases: discovery, evaluation and description and finally, publication. The discovery element may be the result of special literaure-oriented, factographic or data-oriented sources, but in most cases it derives from a mixture of all these sources. The evaluation and description are related to the three functions of the social sciences (ideology, exploration of social reality and preparation of decision making), and the publication is the summing up and the synthesis of the entire work and it presents the results achieved "for approval" to scientific and public opinion. Without their criticism we cannot talk about scientific output or results as there is simply no way of measuring this type of activity. The graphical illustration of the whole cycle would give a spiral composed of constantly reoccurringelements. Process of creation: discovery --•evaluation and description publication —> new discovery -•*• new evaluation and description —*• new publication... and so on, endlessly. It is the publication element - when its results are such - that finally has direct influence on science and decision making. The upper part of the spiral often represents the extended sphere of knowledge of one and the same phenomenon. The spiral is all the more a good form of illustration because it is an unfinished ouvre that refers to the infinite character of human knowledge. Social practice and science together prove the correctness of the new findings. 6. Seven supplementary remarks and a "bon mot" in conclusion The "information service" provided by libraries in the social sciences historically preceded those provided by the technical sciences. The importance that people in ancient times attached to libraries and the information stored by them, is easily seen in the light of the flames of the Alexandrian library. But several centuries later it was in another library, in the British Museum, that one particular load of information of our age - even if it is not the most effective one — The Capital was written. Which highly up-to-date scientific information system operated by telecommunications technology or automated technical literature system has ever caused a similar "information boom" in the world? We do not, however, wish to make scholarly comparisons nor do we strive to reveal the mysteries of information in this paper. There are thousands of publications on this topic as it is. We should merely like to stress what history seems to prove: the notions "hard" and "soft" should be dealt with carefully even in the field of information. Our main intention in this paper was to discuss certain characteristics and aspects and the historical development of social science information, but instead of opposing these to science and technology information, we wanted to point out the differences within the whole problem of scientific information, in the spirit of "diversity in unity ". An excellent study has been published recently in the Journal of Documentation (1984. no. 2. pp. 94-119.) — a study based on a bibliography of 112 items —