A successful half century: the MESZL Sociology Collection is 50 years old

Part 1: History

An "impossible" and "fun" collection

A successful collection in a library is always the library collection of the present - this gives purpose, significance and intensity to its work, and it serves the present in the best sense of the word. Not the future, not even if it refers to the future generations when it comes to protecting the documents for, read by no one and in their original, physical forms, since this is for the present, since according to its understanding of itself, these documents have to be saved just like this for the future. This is no different in the case of MESZL Sociology Collection (hereinafter: SC). Otherwise, it would be an empty chamber; but since it remained a busy place, the history of its successful half-century can be told as the story of the evolution of the changing and serving of the present.

The establishment of SC is inseparable from the history of the Hungarian institutionalization of sociology. There were many attempts for this, meaning the institutionalization of sociology. The most successful has been during the 1960s and '70s. At this time, the first academic research group of sociology has formed, the MTA Research Group of Sociology (1963), which became in a few years the Research Institute of Sociology (1968), then the first university departments and periodicals were born, and the MESZL became the national reference library of sociology (1968), with the department currently (since 2000) called Sociology Collection.

On 22nd May 1973, the City Council approved the establisment of a separate department inside MESZL. This department was named the Documentation Department of Sociology. This establishment was made possibly via a legislation in 1968, in which the MESZL was designated as a national scientific reference library; since then our library has functioned as the national reference library of sociology. The 1960s-70s were spent in the spirit of „bibliographical renaissance”, by creating various reference bibliographies, then in the 1980s, while the bibliographical works continued, the first period of „database-building wave” has started. Both served the institutionalization of sociology in Hungary, and also its disciplinarization and professionalization.

When we say "institutionalization", we don't just mean the establishments of various scientific institutions (universities, institutes, research groups, periodicals, reference libraries), but rather the successful actions regarding the setting of boundaries, which results in the representatives of a discipline becoming the legitimate creators of a special branch of knowledge. This process is inseparable from the need of these representatives: the need for the competence-monopoly and autonomy of the creation of the special knowledge. This also means that any type of outside control is viewed as illegitimate and is to be excluded, while needs, expectations are set for the services and equipment necessary to practice science.

The latter is approximately what we can find in the 1966 Report, which evaluated the stock of sociology books and periodicals in MESZL, written by Ágnes Heller and Iván Szelényi, who were commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and the City Council; this report was also significant in designating the library as the national reference library of sociology. It is "approximately" only, because in the 1960s the restarting Hungarian sociology did not appear as a discipline, but as a science still figuring out its subject and area, method and place in the social sciences. However, sociology as a discipline did not have to be created, the Western countries already had it, so that served as an example, while there was already a political context, the Soviet empire and inside it the Kádár-regime. This duality can be observed in the Report, which is a symbolic document for the first two-three decades of SC and the Hungarian institutionalization of sociology.

In their report, Heller and Szelényi mentioned, as a flaw of the periodical stock, that - they wrote - "we cannot find the sociology periodicals of socialist countries in the catalogue", because "to fulfill the basic library functions, it is essential to acquire the periodicals of the friendly nations." Another flaw is that certain "standard western periodicals", "substantial periodicals", "very significant periodicals" are also not in the catalogue. As for the library stock, they state that there are flaws both in the methodology and the various professional sociologies, and also that there are many "unnecessary" works, which do not serve scientific research or dissemination of knowledge. The number of these is large because - according to Szelényi and Heller - "it is as if the subject meaning of sociology the libraries acquisition group take into account is quite archaic, so they view everything that has to do with or mentions society as sociology." Last but not least, Heller and Szelényi, as representatives of sociology as science, propose their suggestions on how to better serve the scientific research of sociology with the acquisitions of MESZL, the documentation of the stock, the catalogueing and the creating of various bibliographies. And to make all this not just better but modern, as well, "it would be appropriate - wrote Heller and Szelényi - to keep up a continuous relationship between the library and the researchers of sociology".

In these quotes, we can find everything that makes this Report a symbolic document for the first two-three decades of SC and the Hungarian institutionalization of sociology. It has the political context as a factor; the representatives of sociology, who, by following the example, already know what is and is not sociology, what is and is not sociological, what is "standard", "substantial", "very significant", "important" or "essential", "basic"; the fact that the representatives of sociology set needs and expectations for the services and equipment necessary to practice their science.

Once MESZL became a reference library of sociology, it made itself serve the sociology wishing to be disciplinarized and professionalized: the SC (back then called Documentation Department of Sociology) in the 1960s-70s spent its time with creating bibliographies of sociology ("bibliographical renaissance"), then in the 1980s with database-building (back then using cards). With this, MESZL and SC continued and reached their goals which were the following: processing of library stock with various bibliographical methods, creating the regular bibliography of the complete Hungarian literature of social sciences and the regular taking of stock of the international literature of social sciences. With these works, they served the institutionalization of sociology in Hungary, and also its disciplinarization and professionalization.

The relationship of sociology and the reference library of sociology was hierarchic in this form: sociology is active, while the library is only active as a servant, the former sets, applies the inner and outer borders of sociology (sociology or not, professional sociologies), defines the needs and expectations towards the library, while the latter fulfills those: acquires, collects, processes, categorizes, assorts, takes stock of, keeps, makes searchable and accessible, records and processes the contents of everything that sociology selects, acknowledges, approves, authenticates, or - in short - does all the bibliographical (recording and processing) procedures.

This form, this hierarchy was disturbed by the bibliographial processing (it began in the 1970s, before the establishment of the Documentation Department of Sociology) and the digitalization (in the 2000s) of the Hungarian history of sociology, and also the digital archive of Hungarian social sciences (this project began in 2003, the digitalized works were available until the end of 2007 on the website of MESZL, but starting from 2008 it became a separate website). On one hand, it is true - as shown by the history of „classic sociology” - that the institutionalization of sociology is served by the creation of its own history and the "classic" canon, which then fulfill a defining role in the scientific discourse. On the other hand, though, these "classics" in Hungarian sociology are not the "classics" of Hungarian sociology. The institutionalized and institutionalizing Hungarian sociology did not and does not need the "classics" of Hungarian sociology, but the "great" (foreign) "classics". This is why, with its bibliography of Hungarian history of sociology, the SC disturbs the hierarchical relationship between sociology as science and library as servant, but it does not change it. That needed something else. Something that made sociology into an „impossible” science. Two of the many reasons for this are the following:

• From the beginning, sociology stubbornly tried to find its place on the palette of disciplines, but it only solidified as one in the 20th century; then, also in the 20th century, an opposite process took place, resulting in what is currently called, differently from interdisciplinarity, as transdisciplinarity. What is special and new about this is that it is no longer just about the cooperation between disciplines, but also about scientific research and examinations that search, find and define its own subject, questions and problems past the disciplinary borders, breaching them if they have to. This happens for example in the case of culture research, world system analysis, feminism and ecology, involving sociology as discipline.
• Sociology defined itself traditionally and disciplinarily as the science of society, so its history is accompanied from the beginning by the goal to differentiate and separate what is society/societal from what is not society/societal. Sociology set a need at once to define and grab what other disciplines (for example philosophy, psychology or political science) defined and appointed as included in their own area, and made them part of society or be societal. Nowadays, however, - for various reasons not detailed here - it is not clear if there are relations that are special enough to be called societal.

So, sociology has became an "impossible" science, meaning it lost its subject and outlines. What it was capable of as a "possible" science and discipline was: defining what is society/al and not society/al, but it is icapable of that today, and as a result there is not - although there may be a need for - someone, who would be a representative of sociology and would be able to educate, guide and make the SC serve sociology as a science. Freedom from disciplinary borders (from their irreplaceable controling-disciplining effect) for SC comes with freedom from the paternalistic or colonizing sociology. Sociology becoming an "impossible" science is also the SC becoming "impossible" and "fun".

This means that no one can tell today's sociology librarian about the aspects and criteria, which are used (never without arbitrariness, uncertainties, temporariness) to collect, update, accumulate, remove, differentiate, assign, sort, set borders, assort, organize and process, namely they can cheerfully experiment, serving and building with them their heterogeneous audience and they have to figure them out and think them through over and over again. Because of this, though the collection, processing and providing of information from scientific literature remained one of the keystones among the works of MESZL as a national reference library, it cannot be done by SC, and it is incapable of doing it the same way as from the 1960s to the 1990s. The emphasis moved from complete collection and bibliographical style to making the primary task not to serve the document and the smallest scientific profession, but to create many new forms of connections between sociology, the science and the wide audience and to fill them up with content. With this the SC fulfills tasks that other institutes of the scientific world are incapable of, but it is just as vital a matter for the scientific world as for the whole of Hungarian society.

Out of the changes of past years, we need to highlight that, after sociology turned into an "impossible" science, the reference library lost the monopoly that it had before the integration of digital books, periodicals and documents, databases into the collection, becoming a hybrid collection. This monopoly, let us call it information monopoly, meant that the foreign sociology science books, science periodicals were mostly accessible through reference libraries for "mere mortals" - for decades. This made it possible to „commercialize the services” of scientific literature, making them available through subscription for MESZL, until the databases had appeared in the reading rooms, accessible locally and/or remotely. This way, it could seem, the reference library not only lost its information monopoly, but also solidified it. Digital documents are not open access, most of the users can only access them exclusively if MESZL subscribes to the appropriate databases. However, when anyone can download hundreds of scientific books and articles in pdf format in seconds without subscription from a certain well-known and public institute in the university-academic sphere, including documents that cannot be found in any library in any form, then it is a mistake and self-deception to think that the information monopoly of reference libraries remained, even if it didn't strengthen.

One of the big challenges in the past years of SC is to join in on the process of creating the sociology knowledge and making it accessible after the age of information monopoly. The way to do this, however, gets clearer and clearer nowadays: making the knowledge accessible today mainly means the sorting, organizing and creating of knowledge. In the age of information created on an industrial scale, information sources competing with each other, AI, algorythms and fake news, new challenges arise for a reference library.

Photo: MESZL