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
85 2. It is the great scientific library (with its information organisation) which optimally and encyclopedically integrates written documents: manuscripts, printed sheets, books, periodicals, reprographically produced non-commercial documents, audiovisual materials, magnetic tapes and other products of informatics. The trends and views of the treatment of written documents may be sketched thus: library science view, information centred view, historical view. The library science view relies on the heritage of great libraries looking back at a time when the concept of scientific information work had not been formed. Specialisation was in its infancy in learning and in libraries. The library used to serve learning in its entirety in those days. Intensive work devoted to valuable collections produced a methodology used for decades resulting first in a library-centred view, and later in a view that shaped library science" for our days. Another process, the great development of public libraries in our age took the same direction. The experiences related to the network of public libraries resulted in a methodology which homed in on library science as well. Factually, the information centred view is rooted in economic and technological development. The Chemische Zentralblatt, the ancestor of reference periodicals started in 1830 and the rest: documents archives and information establishments followed, their rationale being their speed in processing serial literature. Keeping or conserving the documents was no longer necessary as their aim was to serve with information. This activity has peaked in the services tied to computer databases. The historical view — which we should have taken first, perhaps — is manifested most clearly. This takes its roots in generations of librarians involved with history of the book, the printing press and the library, and it is manifested in the continuity of routine work evolved by great libraries. This is a progressive view in so far as it does not claim exclusiveness or special privileges for historical topics. All three views are integral parts of a science and cultural policy, and in their entity they provide one of the main areas of research for bibliology. 3. In a great library of learning up-to-date communication technology is linked with functions pertaining to cultural history in such a way that is capable of displaying bibliological works harmoniously. The result may be regarded a kind of bibliological democratism. Bibliology has significant functions as regards to cultural history whose research would necessarily be carried out in great libraries. These researches provide a framework and harmoniously combine communication technology with charting knowledge. In this sense we may speak of a kind of "bibliological democratism". This manifests itself in being service centred as opposed to taking one of the views already mentioned. It helps to explore any and all kind of knowledge. But beyond all that, bibliology reaches further than the natural pragmatism of information services and investigates the place of writing, the producing of documents in the changes of history. In these changes it is chiefly the document that represents continuity since it is, in the main, both the form and the means of importing knowledge. The writing, the document are qualified as enemies in dark periods of history hence the obliteration of books ever since the burning of the Alexandrian library.
