25th Annual Meeting of the Hungarian Librarians' Association. Contributions at the Session of Technical Libraries

Abstract

The main topics selected for the 25th Annual Meeting of HLA were the relations of libraries and arts. This exciting line has offered possibilities to discuss several interesting aspects of the subject in each session, also in the Session of Technical Libraries like the problems of industrial design.
However, other, more realistic problems were brought to the agenda of this Session, those which are related with arts only formally or, better speaking, symbolically, namely the „art of money making", an acute necessity of these libraries, especially of university libraries.
It has become obvious in Hungary that traditional markets, especially large state-owned companies, for traditional information services belong to the past. New markets for new services should be revealed, markets with purchasing power (at least, for a partial return of expenses). The scale of new services extend from technical background services (e. g., reprography and micrography) to services incorporating substantial added value and mental effort, like studies, market analysis reports etc. A growing role of new technologies has to be foreseen as well.
In this context, three contributions by authors of university libraries (Mrs. E Huszár, Library of the Budapest University of Economics, Mrs. I. Fonyó, Library of the Budapest Technical University and Mrs. É. Zalai, Library of the Horticultural University), presented talks on their innovative services and „money making" activities showing that. at least in these three university libraries, a smooth transition from traditional to modern services seems to take place. Information demands at universities have never jeopardized the transition process as strongly as they did in the industry.
The situation of information institutions other than those of universities is even more difficult. Mr. Gy. Stubnya, in his overview of the traditional information services of the National Technical Information Centre and Library (OMIKK), had to report on a substantial reduction of the number of information users from the industry. Small and medium enterprises, though their number growing, have not reached yet the level even to define their information needs, not to speak of a systematic demand for and use of information on a regular pay basis. Therefore, OMIKK's traditional abstracting journals and current awareness services in Hungarian were forced to be discontinued. As a substitution, the speaker proposed a new bibliographic current awareness service in Hungarian, based on modern information technology, that would satisfy also individual needs. Mr. Stubnya argued that the knowledge of foreign languages of entrepreneurs running SMEs will for a long time remain inadequate to satisfy their information needs which will eventually arise, sooneror later.
The guest speaker, Mr. F. Summann of the University Library of Bielefeld, Germany, presented an account of their CD-ROM project and how it was realized in practice.