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

INFORMATION COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AND THEIR IMPACT ON SOCIETY Communication in society has gone through thorough, even revolutionary changes in the course of history. Three big phases can be distinguished, oral, written, and printed communication. The first is a part of auditive communication, the two last ones of visual communication. The appearance of the wireless in the first half of our century proved the social importance of auditive communication, in spite of the predominance of visual mass communication acquired first by the silent movies, and later by the sound- and colour films. I am referring here to all information communication as a macro-social phenomenon including organized information, if it is not person to person. Today, after the victorious march of television (the most developed audio-visual medium) the triumphant conquest of informatics, we see the rise of a fourth great phase of evolutionary change in information communication, i.e. telematics, or the viewdata system. Viewdata as a collective notion includes television, the telephone and the computer. This is not the proper place to describe the technical details of the viewdata systems. Incidentally, the technical side is known well enough. But the social side of the phenomenon should interest us more. In other words, what can be expected of viewdata in relation to the already existing cultural and scientific media? To what extent will this information communication category change the use of the traditional channels of communication: printed media (books, newspapers, the press) and audiovisual media (television, film, radio)? What can the influence of viewdata be on scientific research, on scientific information services, on the methods and techniques of becoming educated, gathering information, collection of knowledge, or the spending of leisure, the time spent at home? I shall try to sketch hereunder only in broad outlines the characteristic features of the two principal categories of the transmission of information and knowledge in the future: viewdata, as a collective concept for the techniques of communication points, and the library, as the collective notion for traditional reading. In my opinion, we shall witness a process of integration of information and a regrouping of knowledge which will rely on three pillars: electronic communication (posts, telephone and telegramme; satellites, etc.), the computer, and the library. Viewdata should become the catalyst of this process. Let us then see what the viewdata system can offer to libraries. I shall already here indicate my conclusion: services of the two types of communication will be complementary and not competing against each other: there will be a reciprocal stimulation process without negation or exclusion.