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

14 THE SCHEME OF THE FLOW OF INFORMATION WITH "INFORMATION OFFICER" be the minimum of the "information officer's" processing work: apart from producing subject-syntheses it would not be concerned with the processing of primary literature (making abstracts, bibliographies, etc.). To put it another way, the work of the "information officer" begins where that of the documentalist ends. What is being considered here is a tertiary information function. This type of activity would be really an organic part of the research process, one of its most effective elements. It would demand, apart from a knowledge of the library and documentation, a high level of specialized knowledge of the research area in which he operates. The establishment of the function of the "information officer" as described here, is at the same time a conscious formulation of the tendency that the users of documentation, of the secondary information, are in the first place information specialists and not researchers. If this is true, then this evaluation could be enlarged. It is not only relevant for the social sciences but also in a general sense. The tertiary information function could not be done by any library or documentation centre, because their regular activities were oriented to the scientific community as a whole (in a branch of science) and not to individual researchers. Implementing a new communication link, the tertiary information function, by means of research units (institutes, research teams) is one of the ways to make more useful secondary publications. It can be based on existing secondary services produced by libraries and documentation centres and partially based on primary literature. In other words it is necessary to harmonize the contrast between the tendency of the scientific information apparatus to expand and the tendency towards a relatively decreasing use of it. Between the secondary and the tertiary information function there is not a rivalry but a partnership. 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 It could be agreed, that in social sciences the literature search, the consultation of original texts, are integral parts of research work. The critical evaluation and inter-