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

74 means that the utilization of special literature could no longer be left, entirely, to scientists, researchers and librarians as their "internal", corporate affair. "The Third Equal Partner" Thus a new dimension emerged. The first signs governments began "to discover" the importance of science, owing to the unfolding of the scientific and technological revolution. Consequently, the socio-economic relationships of science were formulated as national science policies at the level of state policy. But science is, by nature intolerant of autarchy, departures from national science policies, international and regional, (then world-wide scientific cooperation - functioning within the framework of the U.N. and its specialized organs—) soon appeared. This was followed by the framing of intergovernmental and cross-national science policies. Then, with some delay, the internationalization of scientific information took place and this process is still going on today. The essence of it is that the problématique of scientific information becomes an integral part, first, of national science and then of international policy. UNIS1ST, initiated by the UNESCO and ICSU, and accepted by more than 80 governments in 1971, shows, among other things, that besides science, governments have "discovered" information, too. Thus, the process of upsetting the equilibrium between research and the usability of special literature was codified, internationally, at government level. This process gained speed after World War II. Consequently, information transfer, i.e., scientific information established as transmission, itself became a speciality (information science, informatics). This process has been summed up by György Marx, physicist and member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as follows: "The mass of information accumulated by specialists should be extracted in a way that, while preserving all values, it may be suitable for human synthesis. The specialist leaning over their work-benches and the synthesists seeking to imagine the unimagined will be joined by a third equal partner — the community of information processors (Társadalmi Szemle, 1970. No. 3.). The community of "information processors" exert however, either no or only a slight influence on keeping primary literature (books, journals and research reports) within reasonable limits, or "bringing it under regulation". In a spirit of "publish or perish", there is a nearly endless flow of publications, although some initiatives have been taken — e.g., by the Soviet academician Dubinin — towards a world-wide rationalization of the number and size of journals. The essence of Dubinin's proposal is that journals should publish only summaries made by the authors and the papers themselves should be disseminated in full by international and regional information centres (Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1962. No. 4.). So far, these initiatives and attempts have failed to be realized, but certain international standardization measures, such as ISBN, ISSN and international bibliographical descriptions, etc. have been succesful in promoting the identification and accessibility of documents. The efforts made to achieve a more rational utilization of secondary sources of special literature (i.e., documentation, bibliographies and abstracting services) have reached the round tables of international negotiations at government level, especially