THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Nevertheless, there were other ways in which the Office
could promote the cause of bibliography in Belgium, especially
by encouraging and helping various institutions to print the
catalogues of their libraries. It participated, for example, in
the preparation of the catalogs of the libraries of the Ministry
of Railways, the Central Statistical Commission of
Belgium, and the Ministry of the Interior and Public Instruction.
The first was carried out over the period 1899 to 1902,
the second from 1903 to 1908 (involving the printing of volumes
1 to 4 of its catalog), the third from 1902 to 1911
(involving the printing of volumes 1 to 7 of its catalog).
The Office indexed and revised bibliographical notices sent
to it for these catalogs, and, when the various volumes were
published, dismembered and interfiled them so that each library
would have only one, integrated, catalogue of its holdings. 12
In return for these labours the Office received for its own
use up to as many as 12 copies of each of the printed volumes.
13 It performed these same tasks for other non-governmental
organisations in Belgium, or advised them how to
proceed themselves, 14 and participated in the compilation and
publication of various special catalogs such as, for example,
the catalogs of various expositions arranged by the Cercle
d'Etudes Typographiques of Brussels. 15
In 1906 the OIB began to publish a list of Belgian patents,
first in the Journal des brevets, and then separately in Brussels.
This was a culmination of a number of years of study on
the nature and functions of Patent Offices and the application
of the Decimal Classification to Patent Literature. 16 That
same year a «Notice on the Organisation of Publicity for
Patents: Bibliography of Patents», appeared in the IIB Bulletin
which suggested that a
Patent Office, from the bibliographical point of view and from the
point of view of research, is not only a Library where volumes are
conserved, it is a centre of documentation whose function henceforth
should be quite clear: to gather together the printed documents in
different countries on patents, reduce these documents to a certain
number of primary categories or patent descriptions, thereupon to classify
each patent according to the categories of a uniform classification;
to form in this way from the numerous publications in large
collections, a homogeneous, always up-to-date whole.' 7
This note explored the application of the Decimal Classification
to patent literature, and the OIB began to correspond
with the International Bureau for Industrial Property in
Berne and with groups in America. 18 The formation of a
Repertory of Patents on cards classified according to the
Decimal Classification seemed to be a logical outcome of the-
OIB's studies and of the various international recommendations
for the handling of patents. 19 In Belgium, patent notices
were published sequentially in no particular order in the
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