Foreign core journals in Hungarian libraries

Abstract

The Hungarian Minisiry ol Culture and Education requested a survey, based on the National Széchényi Library's Union Catalogue of Foreign Serials, on the availability of core foreign journals for science and technology. The aim of the investigation was the assessment of journal holdings in libraries in supporting the intormation system of the World Bank funded project for higher education development. Only one extensive survey in Hungary has been performed (in 1979), based on the 1976 list of the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) Journal Citation Reports. The above assessment was announced on the basis of the 1988 Subject Category Listing, based on the sequence of the impact factor. The occurence of journals on the SCI list rose from 75% to 83%, while on the SSCI list they did not change, remaining 70%. In the survey published in 1979 altogether 3680, in the present survey 4554 journal titles were involved. 3601 journal titles can be found registered in SCI and SSCI, distributed through-out 385 libraries in Hungary (231 in Budapest, 154 outside). The 3601 titles consist of 20,765 issues (13,346 in Budapest, 7419 outside). Their distribution according to subject fields and types of libraries is poorly balanced. Broad selections are best found in the central and university libraries (on average 236 and 379 journals/library respectively), while public and college libraries fare worse. Strong subject areas tend to include medicine, followed by technical fields (7662 and 5983 issues respectively), while less favourable is the supply of material to arts and science libraries (1369 and 1478 issues respectively). The situation has worsened during the examined 12 years between the 1988 and 1976 listing. Although the number of core journal titles has increased due to the acquisitions policy of libraries, the number of copies have been greatly reduced, by as much as 50% in some source document areas. This data is characteristic of the entire foreign journal base.