THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

103 numbers were shown as having been assigned to Contributions
to the Bibliographic/, Universalis, but only 68 of these
were actually listed. The discrepancy cannot be accounted for
by the exclusion of minor items. A number of the titles included,
for example, contain as few as two or three hundred notices,
as compared with a genuinely major item such as the
Bibliographia Zoologica which contained over a quarter of a
million notices by 1912. Up to Contribution No. 30, the following
numbers were omitted from Masure's table: No. 1 (the
Bibliographia Sociologica, which though it appeared only three
times in its consolidated form contained over 6,000 notices),
and Nos. 5, 7, 9—11, 14, 18—19, 21—25, 28—29. Some of the
titles so numbered can be found in the IIB's 1899 Annual. 21
Many, but not all of these titles contain only a small number
of entries, and many of them represent short lived periodicals.
Some of the gaps in the numerical series may have represented
works which Otlet and La Fontaine had hoped to include in the
series. But even this conclusion is not a straightforward one.
Vurgey's Bibliographia Esthetica, for example, published by
IIB itself with the typical IIB covers and title page for a Contribution
to the Bibliographia Universalis, though by no means
insignificant in size, was omitted from Masure's list.
A characteristic one would expect of a list of Contributions
to the Bibliographia Universalis is a quite direct correspondence
between the given numerical sequence of the items
and the chronological sequence of their publication. On the
whole this correspondence exists, though not completely.
No. 38, for example, Henri La Fontaine's Bibliographie de la
Paix was published by the Institute in 1910. The preceding and
succeeding numbers belong to the period 1902—03, so that it
is an interpolation in the list, presumably to take up an unused
number. Contributions 68 to 73 for the period 1903 to 1911
seem to have the expected correspondence between number and
chronology. From this point on, however, the list shows increasing
confusion between the two sequences. Many of the later
numbers are given to works having a considerably earlier publication
date than their numbers would lead one to expect.
Most of the publications involved were American or English
printed library catalogues or reading lists, and as such, often
employed decimal numbers and a standardised entry form.
They met, therefore, the criteria employed for determining eligibility
for inclusion in the Bibliographia Universalis but they
do not represent a genuine co-operative effort between the IIB
and their publishers.
In its earliest days, the IIB stressed that the Bibliographia
Universalis was a cooperative venture (though the Institute's
responsibilities for it were strictly limited), and many publications
in the series (though not all, as Otlet explained to Put-
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