THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Chapter
THE UNIVERSAL BIBLIOGRAPHIC REPERTORY
BIBLIOGRAPHIA UNIVERSALIS
The Universal Decimal Classification, the evolution of
which was described in the last chapter, was a tool, a means
to an end, only one element, though a major one, in the
IIB-IOB's programme of international bibliographic standardisation
and co-operation for the compilation of a Universal
Bibliographic Repertory (RBU). In their first accounts of
this bibliographer's philosopher's stone, Otlet and La Fontaine
had only gone so far as to say that it should be complete, arranged
both numerically by the number of the Decimal Classification
and alphabetically by authors' names, that it should
be compiled on cards so that it could easily be kept up to date
and excerpted, that it should be reasonably accurate, that
scholars and others to whom it would be useful should have
ready access to it, and that it should take into account existing
bibliographical work. 1
At the first International Conference of Bibliography, cooperation
for its development took two major forms. The first
was the acceptance by various individuals in the name of the
special organisations they represented or on their own initiative,
of the work of developing parts of the decimal classification.
The second was the application of the classification either to
the articles of substantive journals, or more especially to the
entries in periodical bibliographies. Indeed, a number of the
editors of these journals were among those who offered to help
in the work of expanding the classification tables. As a result
of the Conference, a number of periodical bibliographies
were at once transformed to meet the requirements of the
RBU as described by Otlet and La Fontaine. Otlet and La
Fontaine's own Sommaire methodique des traites, monographies
et revues de droit and the Sommaire... de sociologie were
now combined and retitled Bibliographia Sociologica. A Bib-
Uographia Philosophica was annexed to the Revue Neoscola-
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