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
23 Not only nature is on the agenda but knowledge as well: its environmental protection, particularly in relation to scientific work. What is, therefore, the relationship between the information revolution and the "environmental protection of knowledge"? The criteria of information functions Narrowly defined, there are two meanings to scientific (library-bibliographic-documentation) information. First it signifies an activity, the organised transfer of secondary information. Secondly it denotes the product of the process which can be expressed in intellectual terms. Cybernetically speaking the product can be a sound, a sign, a datum and in some cases some significant piece of information such as a certain theoretical abstraction. Scientific information transfers secondary data deriving from the primary in an up to date technical manner and form. It is the content of its up to dateness which is significant. This process gets rid of the irrelevant and concentrates on transferring the significant information, 1 i.e. the communication of instructive knowledge or the action of informing with some active and essential quality which is the area of primary communications. The communicating of secondary informations, even in the case of their highest form such as "highlights" or "state of the arts reports" syntheses and studies by information centres cannot go beyond summaries of relevant informations on given topics so they do not communicate original information. Both activities are scientific work: the production of new knowledge and the information about it. But the first belongs to primary the second to secondary information. Yet research about secondary information and the theory consequent upon that belong to the first category. The ammunition of information explosion It follows from the above that even a partial solution to the information explosion cannot be either the developing secondary services or their international transfer; one has to take account of primary publications. There have been certain initiatives. In 1948 Professor Bernai, at a meeting of the Royal Society suggested the regulation of primary publishing 2 and academician Dubinyin in 1962 developed these ideas on regulating publishing. 3 The significant features of these ideas relate to "synoptic periodicals" which replace the traditional ones while full texts would only be available in regional centres. The shock waves of the information explosion resulted in the formation of UNISIST which is the biggest international undertaking that deals with information. Apart from many useful programmes it promotes, its very existence is the result of the present inability to cope with the excess of primary publications. There is justification for the working hypothesis that the growth of traditional communications (books, journals, lectures) and the non-traditional ones (reports and
