THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

government documents, Andrews was to dispatch 80,000 cards
of the Crerar's classified Catalog for incorporation into the
RBU. It appears that Otlet received the cards but that Andrews
never received the documents. 28 To these great national library
catalogs were added current national bibliographies such
as the Bibliographie de la France, the Bookseller, the Nederlandsch
Bibliographie, and, of course, the Bibliographie de-
Belgique.
The various subject repertories were apparently not compiled
from exactly the same sources as the main alphabetical
author repertory but mainly from the Contributions to the
Bibliographia Univer satis, the current national bibliographies
and standard special bibliographies, prominent among which
were the Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers and
the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature. 29
The growth of the repertories fed from this multitude of
sources, which Repertory IV in 1912 showed to be nearly
2,000 in number, was predictably rapid. From a million and a
half notices in 1897, the repertories swelled to 6,269,750 by
the end of July 1903. In 1903 the Author Repertory alone contained
3,061,000 notices which required 3,384 catalog drawers
to house. At that time the full Subject Repertory (Repertory
A) contained 1,541,750 notices, the Abridged Subject Repertory
(Repertory B), 942,000. 30 A year later 350,000 notices had
been added to all repertories but no reclassification of entriesin
Repertory B was attempted during that time, or indeed,.
subsequently. 31 Though by 1912 the rate of growth of the repertories
had slowed down very considerably, the total in that
year, nearly 9,000,000 entries, was staggering. 32
By 1912, too, a number of the 1903 repertories had been
consolidated. The repertory for titles of books and that for geographical
place were abandoned. The repertory of the titles
of periodicals (NR) was merged with the repertory of indexed
periodicals (NRT), and the periodicals indexed were mainly
those indexed regularly at the Office for the monthly bibliography
of Belgian periodical literature for which the OIB was
responsible and which was issued as part of the Bibliographie
de Belgique. The geographical repertory may have been
merged with another repertory, the Repertoire Iconographique
Universel (Repertory PH) begun at the OIB in 1906, one part
of which was arranged geographically. 33
The basic elements, the technology of the OIB's repertories,
were «information» cards (the cards bearing the entries), divisionary
cards, catalog drawers, the «meubles classeurs» or
the furniture containing banks of drawers.
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The combination of these different elements ... permits the establishment
of card repertories similar to a true book. The information cards
constitute the leaves of the book; the divisionary cards, variously com-