THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Otlet's hopes of America and Dewey and his disappointments
were expressed in a letter written to Dewey in 1903
after a mutual silence of over a year. Having explained what the
Institute had been doing in a general way up to that time and
the specific stage reached in the development and publication
of the classification (the subject manuals), Otlet, adverting to
the principal goal of all of this activity, observed:
If three years ago we had been able to get agreement in organising
bibliographic work in America in perfect concordance with that undertaken
by us in Europe, I think we would have been very much
further along today; we should have rallied all those who hesitated
to the cause of bibliographic unity and to international co-operation
in this matter. Unhappily our movement has not been sustained in
America, despite numerous appeals to those we thought could have
helped us. We cannot get here the considerable sums with which
your kings of Industry gratify your libraries. It is necessary for us
to do much with little. 61
At the fountainhead of the cause of bibliographic unity
lay the Decimal Classification, and Otlet welcomed the resumption
of relations with its inventor:
I hope that from now on we will be able to have a regular correspondence,
and that you will not abandon any longer to an adoptive
father the care of supervising the progress in the world of the
Decimal Classification of which you are and should remain the
natural father. 62
He voiced a similar sentiment four years later when the Brussels
edition of the classification was completed. Its principles
had been expounded enthusiastically by Henry Hopwood before
the Library Association in London, 63 and Otlet drew this
talk and the subsequent discussion of it to Dewey's attention. 6 *
But the new American edition had still not appeared, and Otlet
was troubled by the delay. He feared that the new American
edition, when it finally saw the light of day, might show that
the «integrity» of the 1894 classification had not been maintained.
Otlet had insisted from the very first on the essential inviolability
of the numbers of the 1894 edition as the only way
to avoid local variations in the classification. The 1894 edition
had been set up as an international standard guarded jealously
by the Institute. Otlet had written to Dewey at the time the
printing of the Brussels edition was under way: «I hope you
are following our work attentively and are satisfied with the
effort that we have made to preserve the integrity of the Decimal
Classifications*. 65 Four years later, rather anxiously, he
wrote:
98
There are complaints that so little is known about developments to
the 1894 edition! To those who pass on these complaints to me, I tell
them that you are the great culprit, that you do not interest yourself
any more in your own child now that it has grown up and married
bibliography. Wicked father! Show that you are capable of remorse and
use your good time to regain lost time. 66