AZ ORSZÁGOS SZÉCHÉNYI KÖNYVTÁR ÉVKÖNYVE 1959. Budapest (1961)

IV. Könyvtár- és művelődéstörténeti tanulmányok - Summaires

^he problem of co-ordinating national and international standardisation in the field of library economy and documentation P. LÁZÁR — G. BART A As a consequence of the rapid development of library economy and documentation, increased demand arises for library standardization which again brings forth the development in standardization. This process began on a national basis, but later —within the framework of ISO—it broadened on an international scale. The question of the relationship between national and international documentary standardization was first raised at the 1959 FID Conference in Warsaw. Standardization has to overcome numerous objective (imperative, systematic) and subjective (incidental, not systematic) difficulties before it will become possible to establish rules or fix guiding principles acceptable to everybody concerned on the one hand, and on the other, before practice will actually be regulated by standards. The following main obstacles stand in the way of the unity of documentary standardization and national and international practice (starting from the direction of the systematic towards the incidental difficulties): 1. Legal contents and power, compulsory or recommendatory character of standards (legal inertia); 2. Linguistic deviations (linguistic inertia); 3. Differences in the stage of maturity of the cultural levels, especially in library economy and documentation (developmental inertia); 4. Relations to other fields of standardization (general standardization inertia); 5. Tradition, habit (intellectual inertia); 6. Financial consequences of establishment of standards (economic inertia); 7. Systematic planning and scheduling documentary standardization (documentary standardization inertia). It is apparent that parallelly with promoting international standardization the obstacles of an incidental character must be removed first. A long-term programme of international standardization could do much to improve the skillful planning of library and documentary standardization. This programme should take into account all the results of national standardization hitherto achieved, as well as manifested or latent demands for national standardisation (f. i. the requirements of under-developed countries). There is not much hope for overcoming systematic obstacles to standardization, as this is a much more complicated problem. But some of the systematic deviations do not affect the basic unity and proper co-ordination of international and national standards, which fact is best proved by a comparison of ISO recommendations with the Hungarian national standards. Photo-composing methods T. TOMBOR Due to the rapid progress of the printing trade in recent years the type-layouts, the photo-composing systems have been developed. In the first part of his guide, written specially for librarians, the author discusses the 398