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
137 demonstrated by the quick production of an U.N. document index for the first Middle-East Meeting in Geneva (Gromiko-Kissinger). The library's largest reading room housed - by way of relocation - the U.N. and its Specialized Agencies' collections. The U.N. documents are verbose, hence my "anti-Coolodge " name for them. President Coolidge was famous for his short and precise expressions. Once on a Sunday, when he returned from church, his wife asked him what had happened there: "Preaching", he answered. "About what?", asked his wife curiously. Coolidge thought, then said, after a while: "Evil". Mrs. Coolidge was exasperated. "But what was the preacher's attitude about evil? " Coolidge pondered and said: "Disapproval ". International documents have anti-Coolidge characteristics. What can be said on a single page is said on ten, all full of gobbledegook. Having said that,the U.N. documents are indispensable and are the life and blood of the organisation. Beyond the doors of the Library The Library that had been known only for its collections was now beginning to make an impact professionally, too. It took over U.N. representation in European Conferences, published the Reference List, participated in the UNITAR Seminars and organized the 1972 Documentation Conference and issued a volume by the Document Processing Department. 5 The Documentation Conference featured such international experts as Pierre Piganiol, Franco Casadio, Peter Judge, John Goomarghtigh, Jacques Tocatlian, Sven Welander - representing the different branches of scholarship and of the information science. Members of the Library took part in various international conferences, normally initiated by DHL. This was partly due to Lev Vladimirov, then director of the DHL, now head of library science at Vilnius University — a friend even today. Our staff presented papers on the course of Societa Italiana per Relazioni Internazionali, to the meeting of the Association of Law Librarians and the International Council of Archives. There were many others whose help proved immeasurable for me in my effort to fit in with a new environment but I should not start listing their names here. Ici Genève ... A few words of the life of a city whose railway station the Cornavin should bear this inscription: "Ici Genève, tout le monde descend". I had grown fond of that town which feeling was never tainted with any dissonant experience. It was not a bad thing to be a "V.l.P." in Geneva, but beyond that, private life was easy going, full of excursions to France, to the heart of Switzerland and twice yearly to Budapest. Nevertheless, I missed old friends, some of whom came to visit me in the Library.
