THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

President, and President in 1908, a position he still held as
late as 1923. 51
An extremely important appointment was to the Administrative
Council of the Royal Library and to its sub-commission
for the inspection of the library. Otlet had long been
interested in libraries, of course, and had studied Belgian libraries
for a number of years. 52 He prepared reports on the
Royal Library's catalogs and its collections with sensible
and extensive recommendations for their improvement. This
work brought him some public notice. 53 He retained his seat
on the Council until 1914.
In 1906 he was elected to the Libre Academie de Belgique
and became active within it. In the year following his election,
he prepared a report for the Academy on a «Program for the
Minister of Sciences and the Arts». This was a new ministry
centralising administrations which had previously been scattered
inappropriately amongst other government departments.
The administration for Science, Letters and the Fine Arts, for
example, had been attached to the Ministry of Agriculture
in 1884. In 1888 it was transferred to the Ministry of the
Interior and Public Instruction. In 1895 matters connected
with the Fine Arts were returned to the Ministry of Agriculture.
The members of the Libre Academie and the organisations
affiliated with the Musee du Livre were active in campaigning
for the creation of the new Ministry. Baron Descamps,
President of OIB, was appointed to the portfolio. Otlet's report
on the new Ministry was detailed and listed the various institutions
over which it would exercise control, including the
OIB, and discussed certain urgent problems with which it
would have to concern itself. 54
During this time, however, Otlet's family was still in
financial trouble, and Otlet was a busy man much divided
between their affairs and his responsibilities for the OIB—
IIB. The family quarrelled bitterly on occasion over money.
Eventually the two brothers Paul and Maurice and their
stepbrothers and stepsister, Raoul, Adrien, Gaston, Edouard
and Rita, formed themselves into a company, Otlet Freres.
Paul, the oldest and least interested, became President. The
company's main purpose was to guard the family's Spanish
interests, mines at Montcayo and the Soria railway. Raoul
spent much time in Spain as the family's representative but
Otlet was on occasion forced to journey thither himself.
Suddenly, in 1907, his father died at the age of sixty-five.
«With him», Otlet wrote, «disappeared an enlightened, tenacious,
useful energy». 55 As far as Otlet was concerned his father
carried to his grave the possibility of the recovery of the
family's lost fortune. All that was left was the melancholy
and frustrating task of putting his father's tangled business
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