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Presents a personal view of a typical librarian’s career in contemporary Hungary. For a deeper understanding of the country’s peculiar circumstances, a more detailed overview is given about the position, general state and financial conditions of Hungarian libraries, their loss as attractive places of employment and the declining social status of the librarian. The causes that lie behind this are briefly discussed as well as the librarian’s view of possible solutions. A scheme and short explanation of Hungarian librarian training is followed by the author’s personal example. Helped by favourable factors while a student and later as an employee at a prestigious library, she is now the information officer of an international organization in Budapest and is actively involved in promoting international ties for Hungarian librarians.

In the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Bloc countries of Central and Eastern Europe most information technology was unavailable, unaffordable or discouraged for forty years. These countries realise that they must improve their internal infrastructures if they are to become integral parts of the global information infrastructure. We report the results of a mail survey conducted in late 1994 and early 1995 of seventy research libraries in Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, building on the findings from interviews conducted with 300 persons in the region in 1993–1994. Results show that these libraries are acquiring automated processing systems, CD‐ROM databases, and connections to computer networks at a rapid rate and that automation activity has increased substantially since 1989; we report specific data on system implementation and network services by country and by type of library. ‘Access’ is their top reason to automate, which appears to mean placing the catalogue online with better search capabilities and putting items on the shelves faster — but does not necessarily mean improvements in self‐service for library users. Co‐operation and standards are highly‐ranked automation goals, yet we find anomalous results on each. Management goals focus more on speed and processing than on management information, staffing or advancing the mission of the parent organisation. Management of human resources ranks low, despite the need for wider staff involvement in the system selection process, education of technically‐trained library professionals, continuing training of staff and training of library users. We conclude with implications of these results for the region.