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

EUROPEAN CO-OPERATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION AND DOCUMENTATION: A PROCESS OF MATURATION Social science information for all: some characteristics Social science information is not aimed at social scientists alone, it is for everybody; it tends to become universal in one form or another through the media, much in the same way as the most advanced physics manifests itself in the form of electronic gadgets. Both, the repacked information, transmitted by the media, and the products of micro-electronics equally shape our views and way of life. Its global nature can be seen as another feature: the world's major problems, such as the upholding of peace, nutrition, energy, the struggle against terrorism, the supply of raw materials and the like, affect every country, and they are all of a social scientific character as regards their solutions. Related with the latter there is also a large-scale innovational process, necessary to the solution of global problems, which includes science, production and information, the latter being at once of a natural, technological and social science character. Though practically none of the so-called global problems can be solved without some contribution by the social sciences, it is generally valid, that research on universal, global and innovation problems is multidisciplinary in character, and so the corresponding information must be too. Antecedents and aims of ECSSID European Cooperation in Social Science Information and Documentation (ECSSID)

1 as an initiative institutionally to establish Europe-wide cooperation in social science information is undoubtedly linked with the Helsinki Final Act. The generator of the conception and its institutional base in the European Coordination Centre for Research and Documentation in Social Sciences, commonly known as the Vienna Centre, a non-governmental organization and an autonomous body of the International Social Science Council founded in 1962, and established in Vienna in 1963 under an agreement between Unesco and the Austrian Government.

2 For ten years the centre was subsidized by Unesco. Since this launching period, the centre has been supported by Unesco contracts, by the twenty-one member countries in various forms, and also by other bodies, such as Academies of Sciences, Unesco national commissions and the like. The main objective of the centre has been, and remains, the development of comparative research work. For many years the documentation aspect hardly existed within the activities of the centre, it was no more than a name. But, to promote linkages between Eastern,