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

M. B. Line interdependence is an intrinsic and permanent feature; it would be surprising, and probably not healthy, if sociology was largely self-sufficient. Another characteristic of the social sciences is that, by contrast with science and technology, potential users of bibliographic tools are neither numerous nor wealthy. The market for indexing services may therefore not be large or rich enough to support publications on the scale of, say, Biological Abstracts. Moreover, again in contrast with scientists, there has been little demand from social scientists for better services; the penalties for ignorance are far less than in science, largely because absolute replication of research is rare - material objects do not change between one project and another or from one country to another, but human beings do, and the same study at different times or in different places is unlikely to yield the same results. Some of the above problems can be alleviated by use of the Social Sciences Citation Index, since this cuts across subject boundaries, and also partially compensates for the deficiencies of subject indexing by taking a different approach to access. But it is best regarded as an additional tool, not as a substitute for more conventional ones. What has changed in the last 20 years? Not a great deal, it must be said. In the 1970s I expressed the hope that some entrepreneur would produce a better service or services, covering wider areas more comprehensively than most existing bibliographic tools, taking their markets and driving them out of business. From the large databases subsets could be produced, either on demand or as published bibliographies if there was a market for them; these published tools would be of manageable size and therefore moderately priced. This has not happened. All that has really changed is that nearly all bibliographic services now construct databases by computer and use these as the basis for printed and online services. This has made them available more quickly and more widely, and also perhaps made searching easier, but the actual contents are no better. The need for better access is more acute than it was 20 years ago. There is more literature, and at the same time libraries are able to acquire less and less of it. Browsing on the shelves is therefore less likely to yield useful results, and the ability to find out with some precision what there is on different subjects is more important. It will become still more important. There is now hope of improvement with the recent transformation of Unesco's International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), a set of four volumes relating respectively to Anthropology, Economics, Political science and Sociology. In its old form this tool, published since 1952, was of very limited value, since it was published only once a year and was thus out of date by the time it appeared; it was highly selective in its coverage; and its subject arrangement was not very helpful. Where it did perform a useful job was in its coverage of many journals 168 Thoughts in the library"