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

44 2. Information integration and interdisciplinary needs The basis of interdisciplinary information services, besides comprehensive collections, is the integrated library — archives — informatics service, realized by the Library of the HAS. This interdisciplinary information is the joint result of the wide scope of the contents of the holdings, the types of the collections and the combination of the functions and services. Information services range from conventional reference work to the use of computerized data bases — expressed in UDC language: from the 0 to the 9 class. The creation, organization and dissemination of interdisciplinary information at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and its library has historical and, in its application to research, practical reasons. The historical cause is simple. Until the country's Liberation in 1945, the HAS, set up principally with the help of donations for the purpose of promoting the Hungarian language, its library maintained by donations and international exchange of publications, had been an exclusive establishment with a bias to the humanities. It is worth mentioning though that the periodicals collection of the library had already been quite important in the sciences as well, as a result of the international exchange of publications (Proceedings,

Compte Rendu's, Abhandlung's of foreign Academies). Furthermore, the Library had been the sole establishment of the Academy. The practical causes are more varied. Following the reorganization of the Academy after 1948, numerous specialized research institutions sprang up from the field of science, social science and the humanities. These institutes have been carrying out basic research and each developed its more or less significant scientific information service. Some have achieved national importance, like the Biological Research Centre (Szeged), the ATOMKI (Institute of Nuclear Research, Debrecen), the Central Research Institute of Physics (Budapest). With the professional and methodological guidance of the central library, these information centres formed into a network. Meanwhile the functional system of the central library has also undergone a change: it had to expand to qualify for the provision of a dynamic information service both for the Academy and for Hungarian scientific life as a whole. Among other things it had to be gradually suitable for: a. co-ordinating the libraries and information centres of these research institutes (meaning to some extent co-ordination of their acquisitions and exchange of publications, etc.); b. representing the Academy at international professional organizations (such as MISON, ECSSID - the ECSSID Bulletin is being published here - etc.); c. the keeping of central academic and national scientific records (e.g. compilation of the bibliography recording scientific works of the numbers of the Academy, the collection of candidatural and Academic doctoral theses, registration of travel reports from abroad of Hungarian scholars);