On the prospects of Hungarian abstracting and bibliographic information services

Abstract

G. Stubnya in his talk on the 25th Annual Meeting of the Hungarian Librarians' Association (published in TMT in Vol. 1994, issue No. 1.) took a firm stand for maintaining the processing of selected items from the technical literature in the form of an abstracting service in Hungarian. The present author refers to the results of an investigation conducted in 1981/82 on the future of Hungarian abstracting services, and to the accompanying restructuring of technical abstracting journals and related services then. More than 10 years ago, the decision to maintain those services had been well established, and the results of the restructuring showed that they had been operating completely on cost recovery basis. Since, however, the situation has changed substantially, primarily due to the development of information technology, especially that of CD-ROM databases, and also due to the changes in the intormation market of Hungary. The author concludes that the existence of any Hungarian language abstracting or other bibliographic services is justitied only it the present market demands them and thus their costs can be recovered.