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
17 The power to do or the duty to do? In the introduction of automated documentation, the circumstances of some factors such as the budget, the manpower, the computer, and others, available for a given project, very often play a preponderant role and the concept comes afterwards in conformity with the means provided 1. Yet, it is less important what we can do; it is important what we have to do. All this does not in any way leave in the shade the role played by techniques and technology. The mode of production is not defined so much by its products but rather by the level of the means of production and by the technology. The "product"of the automated documentation is of special nature: information. It is an intellectual product representing at the same time an economic value in some branches of social activities. The accelerated development of science and technology, the needs of production as to the volume and the speed to receive new information, created conditions favourable to promote the information technology and its introduction in the libraries and documentation services 2 . The Marathon runner and thousands of congressiste One does not know how much time it took the Marathon runner to cover the 42 km which separated Athens from the battlefield to announce the victory. But we know that the death of Napoleon in 1821 at St. Helena was not known in Paris until 3 months later. Even in 1898, about 2 months passed after the events of Fachoda (Africa) and the reception of the first messages sent to Paris and to London by Marchand and Kitchener. A little more than a half century later, all the world (100s of millions of TV spectators of some 30 countries) directly viewed the first steps of man on the moon 3 . And what to say about the mass of information currently "consumed" by the 4,000 congress participants at the Congress of philosophy of Vienna (1968), 5,000 participants of the Congress of historians in Moscow (1970), and some those 10,000 invitees for the Congress of anthropologues and ethnologues in Moscow 4 ? Concerning the means of communication (the factor of speed) and the volume of information (the factor of quantity), these two examples have been cited expressly beyond science and technology. These social activities should generate the technical means which could, potentially overpass the problems aroused by the volume of information, its treatment ("processing") and its diffusion. The computer occupies one of the foremost places among these technical means.
