THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

•cards relating to a request was more than 50, confirmation of
the original order would be sought «to obviate surprise*. 35
The number of demand bibliographies provided by the Office
gradually rose over the years. In 1896, 21 requests for bibliographical
information of one kind and another were received.
The next year the number had tripled, and over 1500 cards
were copied and sent off in response to them. By 1912 over
1500 requests were being received each year and the number
of cards copied had grown to over 10,000. The subjects of the
requests ranged from intelligence to coagulation of the blood,
from Bulgarian finances and comparative statistics for European
public debts to the titles of collections of maxims and
proverbs from different countries, from the philosophy of
mathematics to the boomerang. 36
DISTRIBUTING THE RBU
In writing about the RBU, Otlet had asserted that copies
of the whole would be distributed throughout the world to every
major center of learning, where it would soon become an indispensable
adjunct to libraries and laboratories. It was to be
possible also to take out subscriptions to parts of the repertory,
and all of these duplicate repertories would be kept up to
date by regular shipments of copies of the cards added to the
prototype repertory in Brussels. Indeed, it had been suggested
that National Bibliographical Bureaux should be established
in the various countries of the world and that among their
diverse functions would be the maintenance of a copy of the
RBU. 37 On several occasions there were attempts made at the
OIB to initiate ambitious subscription and distribution programs,
but these were nearly always one-time affairs serving to
highlight the problems faced by the Office in achieving
its goal of a fully or, at least, significantly distributed
RBU.
One such attempt followed the Universal Exposition of Paris
in 1900. Part of an enormous exhibit of two million cards prepared
by OIB for the Exposition 38 was deposited in the offices
of the Bibliographical Bureau of Paris. 39 Here was to be
1he first national office outside of Belgium having within it a
growing, duplicate portion of the RBU. The Bibliographical Bureau,
always in rather straitened circumstances, in fact limited
its guardianship to a small duplicate of that part of the
repertory dealing with applied sciences. As a major part of the
Bureau's support derived from the Societe d'encouragement
pour l'industrie nationale, this particular subject bias is understandable.
40 For several years after the Exposition, the OIB
dispatched to Paris parts of the contributions to the Bibliographia
U,niversalis. u These shipments were apparently neither
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