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

THE "AWAKENING" OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION (Social Demands in Information) For centuries the relationships between science and special literature, socio-economic development and the gathering of information remained virtually undisturbed; there was an obvious division of labour and equilibrium between them. Without any complicated transmissions and information services, scientists gathered information, partly directly from one another through correspondence or meetings, and partly by using library collections. Special Literature and Milk Chocolate Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the above-mentioned equilibrium between research and information gathering began to tip over, inventions of great significance came into being in such a way that merited no information in special literature. Milk chocolate, for example, one of the greatest innovations of the food industry, which is probably one of the most popular food products to this day, was made without any traceable impact in special literature. This product of world-wide popularity was worked out experimentally by Daniel Peter in 1875 in Vevey, Switzerland, although at that time there were about one thousand learned journals published and the Chemisches Zentralblatt (1830), the forerunner of abstracting journals, had been known for several decades. Over the nearly three centuries following the publication of the first scientific periodicals in the seventeenth century (i.e., Journal des Savants, Paris and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London) their numbers reached about 100,000. According to a survey conducted in the late 1960s, the number of scientific conferences had nearly quadrupled in 20 years, growing from 1,000 to 3,500. From the Vienna Congress to the present, more than 3,000 international organizations have been established. The great majority of them are not intergovernmental, but professional and scientific — so called NGO — associations. This picture is nearly complete if account is taken of the number of the annual volume of U.N. documents, estimated at 130,000 and filling half a billion pages in the late 1960s - but we have not mentioned the hundreds of thousands of research reports, the so called "grey literature"! From these widely-known data, the similarly well-known conclusion, is drawn to the effect that an information explosion is under way today. The data quoted above do, indeed, indicate a tendency, the essence of which is that the equilibrium between scientific work, research and the usability of special literaure has been upset. This