An account of the activities of OMKDK (Hungarian Central Technical Library and Documentation Centre) in 1971

Abstract

The circulation of the material and the attendance of the public, special (research) library operating within the framework of OMKDK achieved a record in 1971. As will be seen in the tables, the Library's customers – whose overwhelming majority consists of engineers, technicians and highly skilled workers of industrial companies, R+D institutes, and graduate students of technical universities – used a total of 430 000 library units. The number of xerox-copies of items belonging to various collections of the Library also increased.
The Library's acquisitions department has to face same problems as most public libraries. These include:
a powerful increase in special literature production,
a steady increase in book and other document prices.
Giving data on this subject on the basis of the pertinent literature : and the local experiences, the report points out that the average price of books increased by 15,68 per cent and that of periodical by 24,34 per cent as compared to 1970.
The report also gives highly interesting comparative data on loans in the 10 priority subject fields of the library's acquisition policy and also on the circulation of books, acquired in 1969, in the 10 mostly used fields. Several other tables show the breakdown of acquisitions by types of publications, way of acquisition, etc.
The reader is also giver information on some achievements of the Library's document processing, thus e.g. on the processing of Hungarian technical publications in 48 hours, on efforts aimed at formulati uniform directives for classification, and on the state of machine-produced book-format catalogues.
Part of the Library's publications are prepared for skilled worker and technicians employed in production while another part for specialists engaged in research and development work. Publication in increasing numbers are produced jointly by librarians and computer specialists.
A separate chapter of the report is devoted to the scarcity of the Library's storing capacity with particular view to difficulties arising from extramural stacks, and to the necessity of surveying the related tasks to be performed.
By way of conclusion, the report makes mention of some endeavours to improve the climate in the working places, Certain results in this field, too, are worthy of mention.