THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

liographic information in notices issued in various forms weredevised,
a clear picture began to emerge of the RBU as a
physical entity and of the international co-operation which was
intended to support its development.
Otlet described the RBU in some detail to the second International
Conference of Bibliography which took place in
Brussels at the beginning of August 1897. When it is completed,
said Otlet
This repertory will consist of an inventory of all that has been written
at all times, in all languages, and on all subjects. It will be the ledger
of science, an Accounting Department where are registered all the
intellectual riches of humanity as they are produced. It will be an
instrument of study and of information without equal, which will give
immediate replies to these two kinds of questions for which, until now,
there has been no complete answer: what has appeared on such and
such a subject? What works have been written by such and such an
author? The repertory will contain twenty to thirty million references
according to the first estimates. Division of labour and co-operation
alone can assure its realisation.
Its present state is as follows. At Brussels there functions a Central
Office whose technical personnel, assisted by numerous employees, are
busy with collection and classification for the retrospective bibliography.
Already a million and a half cards have been collected. There
is at the moment no question of publishing this work which is not
sufficiently far advanced and would, moreover, involve considerablesums;
but this repertory is put at the free disposition of whoever
cares to consult it. The Office also provides copies of this or that part
of the manuscript in reply to all requests for information which aremade
to it by letter and which make some allowance for copying
costs.
As for contemporary bibliography, the Office has proposed not only
to include it daily in its repertory, but also to undertake with special
groups, notably scientific associations ... the task of publishing particular
bibliographies on a uniform plan. All these collected special bibliographies
will embrace the whole field of Universal Bibliography
(Bibliographia Universalis). Details of form are left to the free initiative
of those who direct these publications which have, however, two
common features: the first is that each entry carries the symbol of the
decimal classification established by convention (classification number
of the Decimal Classification); the second, is that each bibliographical
title forms in itself a complete whole in such a way as to allow it to
be cut up and pasted on a card. 5
This statement suggests a fundamental difference between the
handling of current and retrospective bibliography at the Office,
between the prototype manuscript of the RBU and the
Bibliographia Universalis. In 1899 the bibliographies recognised
as forming part of the latter were colled Contributions and
were 29 in number. 6 They ranged from the bibliographies published
by the Concilium Bibliographicum, to individual bibliographic
works such as Charles Sury's Bibliographie feminine
beige 7 and Henryck Arctowski's Materyaly do Bibliografii
prac naukowych Polskich, & from an Italian Bookseller's catalog
9 and the Belgian national bibliography to the contents tables
114