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

18 Priority : automated documentation or documentary management Automated documentation is a field for implementation by computer. This field is characterized among others by the need for storing a great number of textual data information storage and retrieval and by the possibility of qualitative "retrieval " where the factor of speed does play practically no role. From these statements we can conclude that the accent should be put on the preparatory intellectual work. The ensemble comprises at the same time questions of organization, professional training, and finding of the methods inherent to the automation such as the establishment of thesauri. However, the realization of the automated documentation does not depend only on technical parameters but on the level of the management and of training. One could qualify this ensemble as institutional maturity. The library or documentation or information management should therefore have priority in relation to the automated documentation. The objectives of the last are the arrival of the first mentioned. The objectives of documentary management Documentary management refers to the politics and to the general concept of an institution for scientific information. The management is the realization and the practical part of policies. It should be determined by the potential sources and by the needs for information. It should envisage the answers in a concrete way to the following questions: — what is the role and what are the functions of the institution? — what are its collections? — who are the users? — what kind of services does it offer? — what is the size of its services? — which are the internal services to be developed through traditional methods (including "small mechanization ")? — the same question relating to the external services whether they should be charged with the dissemination of information? — what are the internal services to be developed through advanced techniques: computers, micro-reproduction? — the same question relating to external services — what can be the most appropriate structure to develop within the framework in which functions and tasks are executed? In other words, first the general lines of a system analysis should be traced and afterwards this should be followed by the establishment of a feasibility study on automation.