THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

to a complaint from Herbert Putnam that the Library of Congress
had not received all the publications which constituted
parts of the Bibliographia Universalis, explained that the Bibliographia
Universalis «is formed by a series of bibliographies
published on a uniform plan either by our institute itself, or
by specialists applying our methods. Among the latter there
are those remaining independent of our administration through
necessity or by particular individual agreement as the case
may be. We will cite the Bibliographia Geologica, edited by
the Geological Service of Belgium, depending on the Government
and naturally not able to carry on its title page the name
of our Institute*. 17
Comments such as these help one to interpret the significance
of the Bibliographia Universalis for OIB. One thing is
clear. The bibliographies that were part of this series were intended
in the first instance not to be any kind of direct output
of a centralised RBU, though Otlet and La Fontaine sometimes
wrote about them as if they were. They represented enormous,
protracted effort to achieve international, standardised,
coordinated input to the RBU. Except for the bibliographies
published by the OIB itself, subscriptions were usually entered
for Contributions to the Bibliographia Universalis directly
with the organisations publishing them.
The existence and the extent of the early development of
the Bibliographia Universalis suggest that initially Otlet and
La Fontaine's views about channeling current bibliographic
work into the RBU were practicable. In 1903, 14 items in the
Bibliographia Universalis, bibliographies appearing periodically
over a number of years, contained nearly half a million notices.
From the period 1895/96 to 1903 there were 103,000 items
in the Bibliograhia Zoologica, approximately 25,000 in a Bib-
Hographie des Chemins de Fer, the compiler of which, Louis
Weissenbruch, had developed the appropriate parts of the Decimal
Classification, 93,000 in the Bibliographie de Belgique,
38,000 in the Bibliographia Geologica, and approximately
108,000 in the French Bibliographia Medica. n
By 1912, according to Louis Masure, who compiled a table
of the Bibliographia Universalis for the IIB's Annual Report,
The Bibliographia Universalis today contains more than a hundred
different contributions of which a number are periodicals and appear
regularly. Altogether there has been published as of today more than
1,250,000 notices. The following table indicates the state, as of 31 December,
1912, of the principal contributions to the Bibliographia Universalis.
This is based on the receipt of volumes, fascicules and cards
at the headquarters of the IIB. 19
In point of fact, the table shows that the Bibliographia Universalis
had yielded 1,293,652 notices for the RBU, and consisted
of at least 103 contributions. 20 Masure's table and these
figures, however, need to be carefully interpreted. At least
116