Documentation and information in Hungary before and after the liberation

Abstract

Scientific information had considerable precedents in the years before the Second World War. At the end of the 18th Century an information society on mining was active in Northern Hungary, in the seeond half of the 19th Century medical documentation started in professional journals and a medical abstracts journal was also established. Agricultural and economic information showed also some progress, whereas technical documentation remained rather underdeveloped. All these initiatives were, however, partly incidental, partly spontaneous; they were mostly discontinued at the beginning or during the Second World War.
Therefore documentation had to be started practically from zero after the liberation of the country, in 1945. In 1949, on the initiative of the Supreme Economic Council, a government decree established the national documentation system consisting of branch centres in the fields of technology, agriculture, economics and medicine. A National Documentation Centre was placed at the top of the system with the tasks of system development, co-ordination and methodological guidance. Unfortunately, this progressive system has been abandoned and at the beginning of the fifties, the National Documentation Centre and the Economic Documentation Centre were dissolved, the Technical Documentation Centre and the Agricultural Documentation Centre were incorporated in the respective national apecial libraries.
In the field of technical documentation the establishment of information centres of the ministries and the subordination of matters of the technical-economic information system to the State Office for Technical Development proved to be advantageous to the case of documentation. The State Office prepared a development plan for documentation in 1963.
During the introduction of the new system of economic management guidelines were issued concerning the national information system, which consists of the statistical, the financial and the scientific and technical information subsystems. The last one is, on its term, subdivided into the following subsystems: technical-economic information, foreign market research and domestic market research. The establishment of the social science information system has now been started; it will include several subsystems (politics, law, economics, history, psychology, pedagogy, public education etc.).
The Information centres, particularly in technology and agriculture some of them active during 20-25 years, fulfill various types of proceseing and after several hundreds of publications and other services, including technical-economic digests providing full informations and SDI services.
The most urgent problems of development include the application of computer technology and micro-reprography. The basic new task is to strengthen the participation in international information systems, first of all in the International Scientific and Technical Information System of the socialist countries (Moscow), in the International Nuclear Information System (INIS) and the UNISIST programme.