Rózsa György (szerk.): The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1826–1976.

III. Special collections - Periodicals Department

III. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Special collections are those units of the Library which are in themselves responsible for basic library works such as acquisition, processing, readers' service, reference service, and according to the appropriate character of their holdings they exist as 'libraries within the library'. Periodicals Department The Library's Periodicals Department is the country's largest collection in the field of the humanities. It has a great importance also in the field of general social sciences and of basic research in the natural sciences. The holdings consist of about 12 500 periodical titles, and of which approximately 5 000 titles are current foreign periodicals. The Periodicals Department is the richest treasurehouse of periodicals issued by foreign academies and scientific societies. As a result of exchange activities of one century and a half, the Library of the Academy is in the possession of almost complete series of rare periodicals such as those of the academies of Austria, St. Petersburg, Bavaria, Saxony, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great-Britain and France, which have a unique value in our country, to mention only a few examples of important periodicals with great past: the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Journal des Savants, Doklady Akademii Nauk USSR, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences de Paris, Sitzungsberichte, österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. The rules for using periodicals are the same as for books with the difference that they may not be lent. The Periodicals Department is an independent unit; it carries out every working process related to all periodicals. Its most important tasks are as follows: acquisition in cooperation with exchange activities, handling of various registers, cataloguing and classifying periodicals, building proper catalogues, preservation and shelving of periodicals and readers' service. The latest handbook on its holdings, published in 1973, is an alphabetic and subject index of periodicals.