The United Social Sciences Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

51. évfolyam, 2005. 1. szám

MARKELLA, Anikó

Könyvtári Figyelő (Library Review) vol. 15. (51.) 2005. no. 1. pp. 59 – 62.

The youngest social sciences library in Hungary was founded five years ago with the merging of libraries of three research institutes of the Academy of Sciences. Before 1994, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences operated a network of research institutes with a corresponding network of 40 research libraries of special profiles, offering limited public access. The network system was ended by the law on the Academy of Sciences in 1994. As a result of this measure, the research libraries have remained without professional supervision and support. They are also at a disadvantage due to their status: they do not belong to the category of “libraries open to all” defined by the library law of 1997, consequently do not benefit from central funding for library development.

In 1999, three research institutes of the Academy of Sciences (the Institute of Political Sciences, the Institute of Sociology, and the Institute for World Economics) moved to the same location. The united library was created by the merging of the holdings of the three individual libraries of these institutes. The united library started to operate with a collection of 150,000 volumes and 8 staff relocated from the previous libraries. Most of the difficulties of the merging arose from the differences as far as the level of cataloguing, the depth of cataloguing, the applied indexing system, the expectations of the library users (researchers), the scope of library services and the work processes within the three libraries.

Following the organisational changes, the united collection was established. Double copies were filtered and some volumes were cancelled. In 2001, more changes followed in the library. The Institute for Minority Studies was created that took some space from the library’s periodicals reading room as well as from the offices of library staff.

The core mission of the library is the support to research carried out at the institutes. Its primary users are researchers from the four institutes served by the library, but the library is open for scientists from other institutes as well. A few obstacles hinder the collection development: the library does not have an own budget and there is no separate budget for library purposes within the budgets of the four institutes either, so the institutes’ financial contributions are uneven. The library staff is planning to convert the collection catalogued in TINLIB into HUNTÉKA, a Hungarian integrated library system. Due to the lack of third party funding, retrospective conversion is progressing slowly. A long term plan is being elaborated for the setting up of a virtual catalogue covering other social sciences collections of the Academy.

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