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

J. Meyriat edge and the know-how of some people. An example may be the Seminar on automated bibliographical data bases in Europe, held in Paris during the Summer of 1981, in the framework of ECSSID, the Programme for European Cooperation in SSID coordinated by the Vienna Center. Co-directed by a French and a Hungarian expert, it was conducted by ten speakers from seven different European countries, plus an international civil servant. Sponsored and subsidized by Unesco, it was attended by a total of 33 persons coming from 13 countries. As an outcome, much valuable information was collected and the members of the group benefited from mutual interaction. Another achievement resulting from the ECSSID programme concerns information on ongoing research. On a number of topics chosen as being interdisciplinary, e. g. "the changing role of women in society", one or several pertinent research centres in each European country are asked to collect information on research ongoing in the country and to send it to a small team of editors (different for each topic). After checking and editing the data, a volume is published, giving way to useful comparisons between the research interests and the methods of many institutions and social scientists. For other types of information, networks of cooperating institutions could also be organized. Such is APINESS: Asia-Pacific Information Network in Social Sciences, coordinated by the National Social Science Documentation Centre of New Delhi, which relies on the contributions of national contact points in sixteen countries of the region. More specialized and dealing with information referring to socio-economic planning is INFOPLAN, a network of Latin American information services animated by the Latin American Centre of Economic and Social Documentation in Santiago de Chile. The cooperative ventures exemplified above are multilateral by nature. But bilateral cooperation must also be mentioned; it is often easier to manage, and nonetheless very fruitful. It may be limited to one person going to a foreign country to help, to advise, to teach. Another foreign person may be received in a course or in a documentation centre. Partners may as well be institutions rather than persons. In brief, all the purposes previously described may be served by bilateral cooperation. By way of conclusion From what is written here the reader has guessed that György Rózsa, leaving aside all his other merits, bears witness to what is international cooperation at its best. He was for many years a member, and for a time the Chairman, of the 194 Thoughts in the library "