THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

of OIB, then, Masure seems to have been intelligent, faithful,
meticulous, unassuming, unassertive, competent, patient,
persistent — in a word, indispensable. He provided an oftentested
but strong thread of administrative continuity in the
Office for twenty seven years.
In 1901, the IIB published a note in its Bulletin on the
«Organisation of national Institutes of Bibliography*. 2
Among the functions of these institutes as here set out were:
the preparation and keeping up-to-date of an integrated
bibliographical repertory on cards for all the material, current
and retrospective, published in a country, a repertory
which could provide a base from which to publish various
kinds of official bibliographies; the maintenance of a duplicate
of the RBU and the organisation of an information service
in connection with it; the preparation of a union catalog of
the libraries of a country; the publication of a bulletin of
information about bibliographical activities being carried out
within a country; and the compilation of an annual report
on the state and statistics of national bibliographical organisation.
National institutes of bibliography were also to serve
as the national liaison body with the IIB and be counsellor to
and, when necessary and if feasible, the agent of national
governments in ail matters of national or international bibliographical
import.
Some of these functions the OIB performed automatically
for Belgium as the headquarters organisation of the IIB. But
other aspects of the work thought appropriate for national
institutes of bibliography were taken up very seriously. The
organisation of a union catalog for Belgian public libraries
was begun in 1902. By 1903 over thirty printed catalogues of
various libraries had been dismembered, pasted on cards, and
interfiled to form an alphabetic author repertory. To this were
added several important publications concerning astronomical
and geological material in Belgian libraries. 3 Over the years
this general catalog grew in size and comprehensiveness
as the catalogs of particular libraries were printed, so that
by 1912 it represented the holdings of 73 libraries and contained
locations for over 30,000 periodical titles. 4 It was planned
eventually to print excerpts from it under the title Central
Catalogue of Belgian Libraries. Only one such excerpt,
Periodicals of Medicine, appears to have been issued, 5 though
negotiations were held with the Belgian Chemical Society in
the hope of gaining its support for the publication of a second
catalog dealing with chemical periodicals in Belgian libraries.
6
From its inception, the OIB was directly involved in the
completion of the Belgian national bibliography, Bibliographie
de Belgique, published by the Belgian Booksellers' Association,
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