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)

I. The socio-professional aspects of the development of the scientific information with special regard to social sciences

INFORMATION NEEDS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Synopsis I. Distinctive features in the use of information by the two great fields of knowledge (science versus social science and humanities); II. The "tertiary " information function or a new communication link; III. The equal partnership (between research and information) and the discrepancy between the demand for information specialists and their shortage owing to the greater attraction of research careers; A. The scheme of the flow of information; B. The scheme of the flow of information with an "information officer". Introduction Society needs all kinds of information, irrespective of provenance and form, which may be effectively utilized within organized social activities, economic, scientific, technological and so on. What I wish to emphasize here is the content, the applicability and the value of information and not its channels and techniques: the latter are also significant since they make information accessible but their treatment belongs to the "technology of information ". Scientific information is a subordinate concept of the intellectual communication system of society. The special significance of information on special literature within the intellectual communication system of society largely depends on time, subject field and on the purpose of applications. I. Distinctive features in the use of information by the two great fields of knowledge (science versus social science and humanities) When investigating the practice in the use of information, one can discern distinctive features in the use of research methods and results and in the specialized literature between the two great fields of knowledge, natural sciences and engineering on the one hand, and social sciences and humanities on the other. The natural sciences and engineering have, for the most part, an experimental character within which basic, applied and development research can be distinguished. The same may be said in the case of the direct applicability of their records which, in the last analysis, become essentially & force of production. The information and data are of an objective character, the time factor (speed) plays an important role in the acquisition