A successful half century: the MESZL Sociology Collection is 50 years old
Part 2: Bibliography
A look back on the Sociology Bibliography

Due to the 50-year anniversary of the Sociology Collection (formerly known as Documentation Department of Sociology), we are doing a retrospective, even though the processing and providing information about sociology/social science is basically the same age as the library (1904-). Erika Karbach, the previous head of the collection (1989-2018), gave a detailed overview of over 100 years of origin story of our bibliography in her presentation, which was held during the 17th June 2009 conference of Hungarian University of Fine Arts Social Science Department, titled 40 years of Hungarian sociology bibliography processing. Tradition and reform.

From printed bibliographies, yearly bibliographies and acquisition registries, through the Sociology information based on current scientific literature first published on paper then CD-ROM, to the Sociology bibliography online (first accessible independently via the website, but now through our catalogue, as well), the processing and providing of information about sociology and relative sciences has traveled a twisting developmental path of infocommunication fit for this service. With the reconstruction and expansion of the Central Library came the large-scale IT developments and the introduction of the Corvina integrated library system. Thanks to these, both the sociology information processing and the technique of providing information went through a fundamental change in the past decades. The processing on one machine with a database called TEXTÁR, with a tight time schedule and done mostly on paper, was replaced by processing on multiple work stations at once, which resulted in the information becoming accessible with one simple click for the readers, both inside and outside of the library. Work in the integrated system began with documents printed in 2007, but during 2011, after a long preparation and a successful TÁMOP tender, the data of previous decades (SzocioWeb 1970-2006) was converted into a catalogue.

Besides, but not separate from, the IT developments, the reform of work organization was significant for the processing of scientific bibliographies in the past few decades, as long as our work on building up the catalogue was shared with the department of Acquisitions and Processing. While in the pre-historic times of having one machine we had a data entry interface that included the description data, now the description is done by the Processing department, even with the analitically processed essays, articles and other partial documents. The other change in work organization was to have the scientific collection-based analytical processing and description creation of new books done at the same time.

The IT developments, the reform of work procedures and, during all this, the use of internet becoming common modified the database building on significant points. The increased capacity options largely expanded the bibliography pool with e.g. electronic documents, or monographies of one author, which were unfortunately neglected before, and the retrospective processing of these documents; on the other hand the almost daily updating of the bibliography became possible. In the past years, the analytical processing of periodicals were also changed, if every one or two weeks we look over the new acquisitions and the complete range of relevant periodicals. With this change, the periodical analytics became searchable with one word and are updated daily, as well.

One element of the aforementioned long preparation, which happened before switching to the integrated system and converting SzocioWeb into a catalogue, was creating the concordance between the subject word set of "Köztaurusz" (thesaurus used by Hungarian libraries, developed by Rudolf Ungváry) and the subject word set custom developed by SzocioWeb. The negotiation process, which lasted for over two years, resulted in most of our original subject words being integrated into Köztaurusz. The database expanded in the past years with over 5000 entries per year, created mainly with the newly acquired Hungarian-published and -related printed books, partial documents and articles of periodicals, with growing numbers of electronic accessibility and documents only accessible electronically.

After the retrospective, let us talk about the challenges we are facing in the future in an ever-changing world. The most important one is to continue building the database just like we are doing it now, with the same persistent and systematic thoroughness, respecting and preserving the traditions of the library and the construction principles laid out by predecessors. From the beginning, the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library has had the goal of servicing the widest range of readers, including not just scientists and university students, but the average citizens interested in societal phenomena. This multitude of responsibilities is reflected by the content of the bibliography with a diverse selection of related literature and demanding informative literature, in addition to the narrowly considered literature material.

Although we can put the new definitions of societal phenomena in the rapidly changing world as free subject words into the bibliography, the regular and broadly-accepted updating of Köztaurusz and incorporating of new, often used phrases in the definition structure of the thesaurus still need to be resolved. Since remote use in searching for information is getting a more significant role among library users when no librarian is readily available, it is even more important during the content processing, when it comes to correctly summarizing the content of the document and translating it to the language of the thesaurus, to put more emphasis on how a reader would search for a specific subject, what words would they most likely use to look for it.

The processing of current bibliography is the focus of the IT, work organization and other developments, and though this takes up the pretty fluctuating capacity of our human resources, we still have ahead of us the retrospective processing of scientific literature from the decades of 1930-1945 and 1948-1969. To make up for some of this, we began the analytical processing and digitalization of the periodical called Social Sciences with great vigor.

Photo: MESZL