Rózsa, George: Some Considerations of the Role of Scientific Libraries in the Age of Scientific and Technical Revolution. An Essay and Approach to the Problem (A MTAK kiadványai 50. Budapest, 1970)

19 plan, without, however, being omitted from the cultural plan, since it also forms a separate heading within the plan of the socio-cultural branch. Accordingly, the trend in the further development of the concept of the unity of library system and librarianship would be this: lo shift the stress towards the unity of science in the light of the library's double feature and commitment. This would be likely to have certain implications in practically every field : problems would arise in such fields as scientific qualification, scientific research, higher education and training, technical instrumentation, etc. All this requires further investigations and also necessitates, in perspective, a many-sided, concrete inquiry into the problem of scientific libraries, and the state of library theory, as part of the national science policy.

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0 These problems are "touchy" only in cases where they are latent and are approached with impatience and mistrust without due understanding, or if questions of prestige, real or imaginary, with different values come to the fore instead of a scientific conception. Anyway, many more important questions, theoretical and practical, remain to be solved in the sphere of the unity of librarianship than the relationship between general scientific and special libraries. VI. THE THEORETICAL FORMULATION AND FOUNDATION OF THE DIVISION OF LABOUR BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIES (AS GENERAL) AND SPECIAL LIBRARIES (AS PARTICULAR) IS ONE OF THE KEYISSUES OF A FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIANSHIP AS A WHOLE In the age of what is called "information deluge", the large scientific library of universal character is nothing but a fiction as regards the comprehensiveness of written documents. Carrying this problem to absurdity, such a universal library would assume all the functions now performed by the national libraries of the world, a task that cannot be tackled even by such immense institutions of "unlimited" possibilities as the Lenin Library or the Library of Congress. And, considered from an international viewpoint, nor is there a need for such a giant institution. It may well be laid down as a principle that "one library is no library" since only the totality of libraries and library networks of a country (or with some exaggeration all libraries of the world) can potentially meet all the demands of science. The document production of a country is made available to both national and international users by the country's national library, and the pooling of these documents in their entirety or even partly into one universal library is all the more unnecessary since both the content and the level of the documents are extremely heterogeneous. Universality in such a sense that a library should collect everything (even only to a defined degree) from Ü to 9 in terms of UDC is also unnecessary. However, there is a positive need for the existence of "universal" or rather general libraries whose "universality" is taken in another sense, even 1

0 This would require a series of analytical studies which could tackle the problems connected with the possibilities of publication. "The publicity" of the theme should involve an open discussion on the major theoretical problems of scientific librarians, along with some more important information problems of the individual branches of science in organs other than the professional library journals. (There have been some initiatives taken in this respect.) 2»