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
82 Appendix A FORWARD LOOKING RESOURCE: INFORMATION POLICY AND KNOWLEDGE INDUSTRY It is accepted internationally that the main resources of nations are: raw materials, energy and information. Here information is equated with knowledge industry, that is to say: the "production" and diffusion of such information which are necessary to the augmented reproduction of intellectual work. This knowledge industry (a part of which is industrial knowledge) — in a future dimension — is a mainstring of economics. But economic development and social progress depends on those who pull the strings. They must be equipped with the necessary information and abilities by the knowledge industry. If information was a basic national resource then it must be treated as a category of economics. Not just information in general but a specific part of it which deals with scientific-economic-technological development and which promotes research. Information R+D belongs to the structure of the knowledge industry which makes it partly an indirect and partly a direct force of production. In this sense one may speak of information economics which comprises the intellectual property of information (databases, surveys of subject fields, library special collections and services provided) and the hardware necessary for producing and communicating information (reprographics, computers connected with telecommunications sets). All this is an integral part of the infrastructure of creativity and science. Information economics is worked by the good husbandry of information but in its economics and social sense it is managed by an information policy. I may add that it is the case in developed industrial countries. From the above it follows that in a country like Hungary with scientific development economic level in the middle range where half of the gross national product depends on foreign trade - which means an open economy - where raw materials and energy are hard priorities and where there is also a linguistic isolation there an information policy must be an integral part of the economic policy. And if it was not so it should be so. Yet it is not so despite the fact that in Hungarian products information should take an ever increasing share. In other words a maximal claim for information is to be expected; from an open economy there evolves an open scientific-technological development which is the basis of an open information economy. This is the process which should be governed by an information policy. Yet there is no general information policy in Hungary and the lack of it could be a component in economic difficulties. There are numerous libraries, documentation units, money to buy foreign special literature but all this cannot work efficiently without an organized structure. There are many reasons for that, some of which I shall list.
