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)

2Ì of time and place. The related questions which are still to be solved include, among others, the elaboration of the feasible forms of the division of labour, ensuring instrumentation, intellectual and technical, necessary to it, the development of the administrative network and sectoral cooperation, and indirectly - the relationship between scientific libraries and the problem of the "two cultures", although thematically this leads on to the next chapter. VII. SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIES HAVE PAR11CLLAR TASKS IN RECONCILING THE CONTRADICTIONS, DIVERGENT \1EWS, AND PROBLEMS ARISING FROM THE DEBATE OF THE „TWO CULTURES" (NATURAL SCIENTIFIC VS. HUMANISTIC ERUDITION AND CULTURE) The concept of the "two cultures" denotes the (natural) scientific and humanistic erudition and world concept as has been used in recent debates.

11 The reader's knowledge of this debate and of its major issues is taken for granted, so it is, therefore, needless to outline it here. The debate, however, poses the question of whether the scientific library can play any role, and if so, what role — in the formation of the "two cultures", the two world concepts and in reconciling the related contradictions? It hardly needs any proof that special libraries and documentation play a considerable part in scientific and technical education, in research and in the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Similarly, the active role of the respective sectoral libraries in the diffusion of the social sciences and humanities is also obvious. Nor is it doubtful that the scientific and technical libraries are also supposed to participate within reasonable compasses in propagating the knowledge incorporated in the social sciences and vice versa, while public libraries should be engaged in diffusing both scientific fields. What is, at most, needed here is the development of more feasible methods and forms. What is, then, the role — or more accurately the particular role — of the historically developed large general scientific libraries with sizeable historical and special collections ? I have already referred to the two extremities of views as to the prospects of written records and the "mechanized culture" (huge machine memories and the "marauder-machines") neither of them being able to solve the problem. Mathematical methods and the resulting mechanical or cyberneticai methods, applications, processes have gained ground in the fields of social sciences and humanities, e.g. in economics, demography, mathematical linguistics, machine translation or in our narrower field: mechanized storage and retrieval of information. This is an irresistible process promoting and enriching science which I

I Literature on this subject is on the increase. Lectures of Charles P. SNOW and Bertrand RUSSELL provoked debates all over the world. Commissioned by the European Coordination Center for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences (Vienna), Professor Sándor SZALAI is the director of a major research project concerned with the problems of free time ("time-budget project"). This project is an outstanding example of East-West cooperation. Here I refer to S. STKUMILIN'S book: Nash mir cherez 20 let. (Moscow, 1962. Sovetskaya Rossiya. pp. 190.). All this and other works not mentioned here, dealing with free time, the division of labour and the possibilities of the personality's development, together with the debates on "alienation", are connected, directly or indirectly, with the „two cultures".