Domsa Károlyné, Fekete Gézáné, Kovács Mária (szerk.): Gondolatok a könyvtárban / Thoughts in the Library (A MTAK közleményei 30. Budapest, 1992)

KÖNYVTÁR ÉS KORSZERŰSÉG – LIBRARY AND MODERNITY

Co-operation in social science information Cooperation may be undertaken between people or institutions within the same country, or between different countries; it is then intemational, its possible forms being the same. The field of social science information and documentation (SSID) may be defined by the matters it includes and the means with which one deals with them. The matters are social science information, or more precisely carriers of information. Most widely used are written documents, among which traditional published documents keep an important place: journal articles, books, government reports, etc. Much information is alsó carried by non-commercially disseminated documents, pertaining to what is called grey literature: dissertations, research reports, business documents, etc. It is clearly more difficult to submit them to bibliographie control. Knowledge not yet incorporated into published documents is alsó of great interest, specially when produced by ongoing research. Pertinent information may then be provided by published or unpublished documents. Frequently alsó their sources are oral, and are provided by the researchers themselves, or the institutions they are connected with. More and more people interested in the social sciences demand information not yet incorporated into documents, but provided under the elementary form of data. These may be numerical or statistical, as are data on industrial or agricultural production, on demographic movements, on electoral returns. Others are factual, e.g. biographical data, chronological data or data on institutions. Most of these data, when they are preserved, are eventually collected and offered for use in directories, surveys, data banks. But firstly they have to be seized as early as possible after the moment they emerge from the social activity which produces them, and only then do they acquire an information value. To deal with this information and data, information workers put into use means which are less specific to the social sciences, with the exception of somé methodological tools. The documentary languages developed to represent information, either thesauri or classification schemes, are necessarily proper to each field of knowledge. But other tools, such as standards on documentation, software for computer processing, etc., are common to all fields of knowledge. The same holds true for the infrastructures needed, such as equipment and furniture, computer hardware, communication and telecommunication networks. Another essential element for an efficient processing is dependent on humán resources. People at work have to be qualified in documentary tasks; they alsó need good enough knowledge of the subjects to be covered, and here again a social science specificity is introduced. Last but not least, ideas are the key to properly deal with information in any field. Ideas are the constituent elements of judicious planning and programming, „ Gondolatok a könyvtárban " 189