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
120 Romania Office for Information and Documentation in Social and Political Sciences, Academy of Social and Political Sciences, Bucharest. Spain Departamento de Libro y Bibliotecas, Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid (contact point and a financing institution). Sweden The Research Council for Humanistic and Social Sciences, Stockholm (national focus agency); USSR The Institute of Scientific Information in Social Sciences (INION), Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Moscow. One crucial point, in addition to general international co-operation, within which ECSSID acts simultaneously as tool and product, is the extent to which the national focal points can be built up and are becoming suitable to encourage and organize co-operation within countries. ECSSID relies on existing international co-operation programmes and does not overlap with them. Together with its other characteristics this represents a tendency rather than a precise programme of action and applies primarily to the overlapping, parallel work. After all, one crucial feature of almost every programme of co-operation in information includes various forms of exchange of experiences, the promotion of information exchange, professional education and training, the introduction of up-to-date technology, and the creation of the intellectual bases for the latter: automation, compatibility in terminology and systematization, etc. The specific character of ECSSID is not to explore terrae incognitae (still less to create them) but rather to apply information transfer on a regional basis to all social science, on the widest scale, from the promotion of exchange of primary documents to the building up of computerized data bases. At the same time, it is certainly designed to explore lacunae or tasks demanding greater efforts such as, exchange of information on ongoing research projects in social science. The first "founding" conference, ECSSID 1, was convened by the Vienna Centre under the auspices of Unesco, prepared by the IOC meeting in Paris, and organized by INION (Institute of Social Science Information of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR) in Moscow, in June 1977, attended by specialists from nineteen European countries and Canada, and also by representatives of six international organizations. 7 Its main purpose was to form an overall picture of the situation of SSID in Europe, as well as of needs, potential and existing possibilities of co-operation. This survey resulted in a unique description of the situation, which has been published. 8 The recommendations of the conference include the establishment of working groups related to specific information topics (see Fig. 1) and the preparation of various documentation materials (e.g. bibliographies). Achievements and problems
