György Rózsa: Information: from claims to needs (Joint edition published by the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Kultura Hungarian Foreign Trading Company. Budapest, 1988)
II. International relations in the field of scientific information
100 2. The Growth Trend of the Volume of Publications of International Organizations The growth trend affecting the volume of journals is evident from the Auger report published by the United Nations and UNESCO in 1961 : If this growth rate becomes constant, there will be some 1 million journals in circulation by the turn of the century. According to estimates made by Allen KENT in an article entitled "Resolution of the literature crises in the decade 1961 — 1970" {Research Management, 1962, No. 1, pp. 49—58), about 2,000 books, newspapers, reviews, reports and other publications and documents, with a total volume of some 1,050 million pages, appear every minute throughout the twenty-four hours of a day. What is to be said about the most noteworthy production of all in terms of both volume and variety of subjects dealth with in United Nations documents' ? Figures not estimates — show that a truly impressive contribution comes from the source. The Secretary-General's note on the budget estimates for the financial year 1970 concerning the production of documents (twenty-fourth session of the General Assembly, document A/7576 of 25 July 1969, para. 2) shows that, in round figures, the growth of the documentation produced internally at Headquarters was as follows: 1964 400 million page-units 1966 500 .. » » 1967 600 .. In percentage terms, this means an increase of 50 per cent for the period 1964For the forty-fifth session of the Economic and Social Council, 130 documents were reproduced in New York, Geneva and elsewhere; a complete set of these documents alone weighed 18 kg and formed a pile 50 cm high (op. cit., para. 159). As a matter of interest it may be mentioned that the delegation which asked for the greatest number of copies of each document — 145 — received a mass of paper weighing 2.5 tons and measuring 75 metres in height. Even if we leave aside the fact that the composition of these 600 million page-units varies very widely as to content, length, reproduction figure, language and variations on the same theme — ranging from bulky documents of great political and economic importance, in three languages and a large number of copies, to short administrative circulars of which only a few copies are made in one or two languages — it must still be borne in mind that the figure of 600 million pages represents only mimeographed and offset production at Headquarters — no printed items — and furthermore, that it does not include the output of the Geneva Office and the specialized agencies. beginning of the 19th century: 1850 1900 1960 100 journals 1,000 » 10,000 .. nearly 100,000 » 1967.
