THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

y the Royal Society for the Catalogue. To this he joined the
closely reasoned, equally adverse critiques of Field and Richet
and published them as a separate fascicule of the IIB Bulletin.
24 By 1902, four volumes had appeared. Concluding a
general appraisal of them and the enterprise which had produced
them, Otlet remarked:
Bibliography to-day has truly become a technique; it has a history,
numerous applications, rules gradually arrived at from several centuries
of experience gathered throughout the world. Why at Burlington
House, does pleasure seem to be taken in transgressing principles
which seem definitely established to-day, and why is there a refusal to
recognise the irresistible force of the contemporary movement towards
co-operation, towards uniformity, of methods, towards co-ordination of
existing scientific undertakings? 25
In 1905 the Manual of the RBU containing the fully developed
tables of the Universal Decimal Classification was tabled
at a meeting in London for the International Catalogue
of Scientific Literature. A note accompanied it requesting that
some agreement between the Catalogue's Council and the IIB
should be reached whereby the scope of the Catalogue would
not be extended as had been suggested at a meeting of the
Executive Committee of the Catalogue in 1904. The IIB would
assume the direction of similar catalogs for «social and
technical sciences*. The note suggested that the regional
bureaux established to co-operate with the Royal Society in
the compilation of the Catalogue could easily extend their
work to include the collection of appropriate material in
•each country for the new subject areas. A formal resolution
>of intent to co-operate with other bibliographical organisations
(the IIB was not specifically mentioned) and a decision to
limit the scope of the Catalogue to the natural sciences was
as much as the Belgians achieved at this meeting. 26
Perhaps Otlet's reservations about the Catalogue as well
as his emphasis on the international work of the OIB—IIB
explained his reluctance to set the OIB up formally as a regional
bureau for the Catalogue, though he acknowledged as
early as 1900 that it could act as one. Eventually in 1907
Henryk Arctowski, a distinguished Polish geophysicist and
Polar explorer, complained that though Belgium subscribed
to a number of copies of the Catalogue, Belgian scientific
work was not properly represented in it. He acknowledged
that OIB had done something already for the Catalogue, but
it was not enough.
In Germany, in France, in Poland and elsewhere committees have
been formed ... by the academies or the learned societies; in Belgium,
on the contrary, we are disinterested in the work which touches us
so directly, and we have abandoned completely to the care of the
OIB work which, in my opinion, should be done more or less under
the responsibility of a competent commission, composed in consequence
of men of science, one specialist for each science, for example. 27 139