THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

egular nor comprehensive, and in 1903 the classified repertory
at the Bibliographical Bureau contained only about
40,000 cards. 42 Another attempt at distribution of the RBU was
made by Otlet in order to fulfil his part of the exchange agreement
with Herbert Putnam of the U. S. Library of Congress.
By May of 1903, 70,000 cards representing various contributions
to the Bibliographia Universalis was assembled in Brussels
and sent off to Washington. A subsequent 50,000 cards
were exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 and were then
sent on to the Library of Congress. Other small dispatches were
made by the Office's staff to Luxembourg 43 and Bulgaria, 44
but they occurred only once as a gesture of encouragement and
support to the libraries involved.
Perhaps the greatest event in the history of the distribution
of the RBU was the receipt of a request in 1911 from
the National Library of Rio de Janeiro for 600,000 cards to
form a general subject repertory. The Library agreed to pay
a fee of 15,000 francs for the cards. Having requested half of
the money in advance «to recruit personnel to do the work», 45
Otlet and his staff gathered together 230,000 cards and arranged
them in classified order in 192 boxes. A reception was
held for the transfer of this material to the Brazilian ambassador,
and to it were invited the diplomatic staffs in France and
Belgium of most of the South American states. 46 By the end of
1913 the amount of material sent consisted of 351,697 notices. 47
Anextra 33,00 notices were dispatched in July 1914, at which
point Masure, the Secretary of the OIB, wrote to the Director
of the Library to suggest that perhaps the Office should send
second copies of cards already sent to Rio for the construction
•of an alphabetic author repertory. 48 The cards which had been
•sent were in the main derived from recent Contributions to the
Bibliographia Universalis, with one or two exceptional items
dating back to the period from 1895 to 1900. It is clear that
the problem of obtaining copies of the bibliographies making
up the Bibliographia Universalis but out of print by 1911 or
of other material in the RBU, was insuperable and the 600,000
figure contracted for was apparently never met. Nevertheless
a high value was set upon the cards received in Rio from the
OIB, and in 1914 an attempt was made to send someone from
Brazil to Brussels to study how the OIB worked in order to
make greater use of them. 49 Unfortunately the War supervened
to make the visit impossible.
Patrick Geddes,, who had met Otlet in Paris at the Universal
Exposition in 1900, had been very impressed by Otlet's
claims for the RBU. Scottish sociologist and town-planner, he
was drawn into the preliminary arrangements for spending the
funds that Andrew Carnegie had placed at the disposal
•of Carnegie's native town, Dunfermline, in 1903. Geddes believed
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