49. évfolyam, 2003. 2. szám

Archívum

MURÁNYI Péter

The article is related to the lecture of the author held at the meeting about the feasibility of the national bibliography of articles on 15 April 2003 in the NSZL. Since the review of the author, prepared on the basis of his contribution, has already been published in the May 2003 issue of Könyvtári Levelező/lap, this paper focuses on two problems related to the Hungarian National Bibliography, Bibliography of Periodical Articles covering natural and social sciences according to its subtitle.

Natural sciences do not have a database in Hungary. The article proves with tables that in most of the natural sciences the HNB BPA stopped the processing of professional journals in the middle of the 1990s, and somewhat later that of popular periodicals was also ceased, thus only some scattered items of literature are included, and the bibliographic control of technical journals depends on whether they are included in applied sciences’ databases or not. Mathematics is covered best in the database of articles, but since international databases (MathSci, file 239 in DIALOG) cover English language journals published in Hungary much more currently and deeply, and make the material of several decades searchable, and since the Internet version of the database is also available in Hungary, processing should not necessarily be carried on in the article database.

As opposed to natural sciences, some social science disciplines (e.g. law, education science, literature) do have separate databases in Hungary. This results in considerable duplications, as a matter of course. The author focused on literary science this time. Comparing the journals processed in the literary database of the Municipal Ervin Szabó Library and the sources of literary articles in the database of periodical articles three groups could be identified. There are many, mainly foreign language, journals that have been processed by the IKER database only, which do not need to be included in the future. Only journal that ceased to appear and that are published over the borders are included only in the literary database. However, most of the sources are shared, and the majority of entries come from the same journals. From among the journals which never contain only literary pieces the author has surveyed the processing of a year of the journal Holmi in the databases mentioned and in some other ones. Beside the duplications (literary studies in both databases) and gaps (criticism of non literary works, belles letters are not included anywhere with the exception of the translation database of the National Foreign Language Library) that could be expected on the bases of experiences it can be stated, that the studies of the disciplines mentioned in the title, and also some other ones are included only in the database of periodical articles, and if this ceases they will not be searchable anywhere.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Észrevételek