Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY

Access to the literature of the social sciences: Where do we stand, and where can we go? Maurice B. Line Alexandria. The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues, London 1 7 Research ' carried out under my supervision 15-20 years ago showed that bibliographic control in the social sciences was poor. There was a multiplicity of bibliographies, large and small, with a huge overlap between them but with significant gaps. There was no attempt at coordination. To obtain good coverage in somé subjects, four or five bibliographies had to be used - and even then coverage was by no means complete. Articles often had to wait several months, sometimes many months, before appearing in indexes. Subject access was haphazard; access to the contents of books, a major source in most of the social sciences, was extremely poor. This last was and is true in science and technology as well, but it matters far less there; books account for a very small proportion of citations in those fields, whereas in the social sciences they account for as many as journals. Somé of these deficiencies are attributable in part to characteristics of the social sciences. In the "softer" areas, such as sociology and political science, terminology is unstable over time and variable between different ideologies; Marxist countries had different concepts from capitalist countries, and often different terms for similar concepts. Few of the social sciences have fixed boundaries, and there is a low level of self-suffíciency; for example, over two thirds of references made in sociology journals were to other disciplines such as anthropology, management and political science. One explanation that has been put forward for this is that the social sciences are "immature", but it is more likely that cross-disciplinary Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 167