Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)
An academic library as an integrated information centre: the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Gy. Rózsa particularly through the international exchange of publications. This started in 1833 with the Yearbook (currently called Almanach) with the cooperation of Count István Széchenyi himself, founder and Vice-President of the academy. (In 1991 the 200th anniversary of the birth of "the greatest Hungarian" will be celebrated across the nation). Today this activity covers about 1,600 institutions in nearly 80 countries. 5. The fifth characteristic is the acquisition of scientific and literary remains (both printed books and manuscripts) by donation in the 19th century, and to a certain extent in the 20th. In this connection the origin of the world famous Oriental collection is worth mentioning; this too relates to the library's historical link with the academy. After its foundation, the Learned Society (the original name of the Academy) sent scholars to the Far East in order to search for the origin of Hungarians. The library acquired as one of the first products of this search the Tibetan manuscript collection of Alexander Körösi Csorna, together with the Alexander books, containing the foundations of Tibetan grammar. 4 For artistic value, Kaufmann's Hebraic Collection is of particular importance. 5 The India collection of Sir Aurél Stein, geographer in the British Colonial Office, was acquired by the library with the cooperation of the British government. 6 6. The Archive of the academy (1963) is a department of the LHAS. In contrast to the academic practice of other learned societies, the Hungarian academy did not found an independent archive, but handled its documents as a "corpus" of the Department of Manuscripts. The department has taken over the archive functions of the reorganized (1949) academy, also collecting the official documents of its network of research institutes (see below). 7. Besides the complete collection of books and journals of the academy, the library is the clearing house for documents resulting from research activity not directly linked to the academy but of national importance, such as the publications of old professional societies and postgraduate dissertations ("candidate" and "doctor of sciences"). The library at present contains records of 14,000 dissertations, for which it is the national copyright centre. One of the library's functions, which can be considered as a national one, is the compilation of a bibliography of publications of members of the academy (61,000 publications, by 410 members of the academy). 8. The interdisciplinary nature of the LHAS's collections and services is an eighth feature. The roots of this activity can also be traced back to the first half of the last century. With the beginning of the exchange of publications in response to the academy's publications in the humanities, learned societies abroad started to send their scientific publications as well. Thus the most important Hungarian collection of scientific periodicals was established, including 14,000 titles, of which 5,500 are current. The collection contains nearly 300,000 volumes. 7 32 „ Thoughts in the library "
