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)
II. International relations in the field of scientific information
94 Library and information works Printed catalogues of books, union catalogues of periodicals, national and special bibliographies, abstracts, indexes. In addition to the above types of publications and documents, the library acquires on a continuous basis books and periodicals reflecting the particular interests of the organization, e.g. application of science and technology, contemporary history (especially the inter-war period and World War II), transport (aviation, shipping). Services The library is open to staff members of the U.N. secretariat, the permanent missions at Geneva, the delegates, the accredited journalists and to all researchers who can justify the need to consult the U.N. Geneva Library's collections. 2 Consultation of the library's holdings is carried out in the General Reference Unit or in the specialized reading rooms (about 120 places). U.N. documents, legal and political, economics and transport, international organizations' social problems; the specialized reading rooms are equipped with a selection of books and periodicals in their respective fields, a self-list and card-index of selected periodical articles, this latter being published in the Monthly List of Selected Articles. Outside loans from the Palais are only exceptionally granted. The non-official readers (outside the U.N. and governmental delegates) are supplied with reader cards, the number of these per year is about 1000. Most of them are scholars from all over the world (professors on their sabbatical year, Geneva and French university teachers, study grant holders, etc.). The U.N. bodies served by the library (without the specialized agencies located at Geneva which use its services to a limited extent) are the following: Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), UNCTAD, High Commissioner for Refugees, Narcotic Drugs Division, Opium Board, Disaster Relief Bureau, Division of Human Rights, CESI (Centre of Economic and Social Information), the services related to UNDP, to the Environmental Program, to UNICEF, to UNITAR, the IOB (Inter-organization Board for information systems and related activities), the liaison bureaux of different UN. bodies and departments outside Geneva such as Inter-Agency Affairs, the Geneva Branch of the Office of Science and Technology, the common service of ECE/FAO and the U.N. Office at Geneva itself (the Legal Adviser, the Linguistic Division, the Office of Public Information, the Conference Services, etc.). totaling about 3000 officials. Some economic organizations such as the GATT and the International Trade Centre also use the Library to back up their own special but limited collections. In 1974 some 5600 meetings were held in the Palais. In Spring 1975, the Conference of the Law of the Sea was attended by more than 2000 delegates who made 20 000 pages of photocopies from the collections of the Library. The number of personal consultations in the special reading room organized for the delegates cannot be counted.
