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
136 The professionalisation of political questions One has to tread cautiously here. Anatole France said somewhere that his favourite reading was the list of books. Evidently, he has not worked in an international intergovernmental library, otherwise he would have known that even catalogues are not innocent tools. For example: Once a U.N. delegate complained on behalf of his government's foreign ministry that his country's professional literature was under-represented in the Library. I showed him the list of periodicals in our Monthly List which revealed that his country was adequately represented. In terms of books I requested that he should have a list of the most important ones published. This we compared with those in our catalogue. But before all this could catapult into blames and counterblames I explained that the nature of such complaints could have originated with certain authors who were, at the same time, delegates of conferences. When such authors visit a library they look their own names up in the catalogue. If they could not locate themselves in the catalogue they were ready to jump to conclusions. The delegate then asked me how do I have such psychological insight. I told him that work in my Academy Library had equipped me dealing with such problems. He laughed and sent a favourable report to his government. One of my own staff mentioned once that geographical denominations were out of date in our catalogue and certain countries could take offence. It was suggested that he should act. Truly, the catalogue was full of outdated information and as new countries were being bom, their numbers increased annually. It would have been impossible to correct all catalogue cards. We have solved the problem by creating "see also" references after the new name of each country. Once a delegate complained that we had exhibited the title page of a book that denigrated the head of his state. Well, he had a point. We acted on it, internally. There were demands too, that the Library should get rid of certain books of political science, mainly memoirs. We had to decide on the information contents of such works, and if that was considerable, the book in question had a place in our collections. Despite of our caution, certain bibliographies of ours had non-desirable names in them. On the whole I succesfully resisted undue outside pressure, and the U.N. Office was never requested to intervene. A French expression might stand here as my Geneva motto: When I expressed my intention to leave I was requested to stay - perhaps because I managed to manage "sans histoire ". The anti-Coolidge effect Documents are the bread and butter of the U.N. Library - indescribable quantity. The United Nations Document Index (UNDEX) and the United Nations Bibliographical Information System (UNBIS) both issued by DHL should have accounted for all the documents. With its manual index the Geneva Library wondrously managed to maintain an adequate finding tool. It coped with tens of thousands of working papers too, as was
