THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

in 1912, and at that time the various files contained well over
a quarter of a million entries. 72
It was intended to be organised in such a way that it
would complement the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. Its
purposes were described as:
1. To conserve for public use at an appropriate time the innumerable
graphic documents wherein important events appear from day to
day and where are reproduced objects worthy of being paid some attention;
(
2. To conserve thus, for historians of the future, documents recording
transitory aspects of modern life of the disappearance of which there
is a strong risk if they are not systematically collected...;
3. To permit anyone whatever who wishes to study a subject to obtain
a summary idea of the whole by a simple glance at illustrations of the
subject;
4. To procure for men of science, administrators and statesmen, for
technicians, for the world of commerce and industry, illustrative, precise,
accurate and pertinent documents on the different objects of
their research and their activity;
5. To furnish artists and artisans in the practice of their craft indispensable
documents for their work;
6. To furnish documents for illustrations in books, reviews and
journals for teaching and for lecturers;
7. To facilitate preliminary study for travel. 73
In 1907 the IIB actually developed standards for repertories
of dossiers which had become of increasing importance
to its work after the formation of the Universal Iconographic
Repertory. The special furniture constructed for housing them
was described and illustrated, and the mounting, arrangement
and use of materials in specially designed folders or dossiers
explained. By this time the kind of materials deposited in
dossiers was extended beyond the merely illustrative. «The
name of 'dossier' is given to the whole of the pieces gathered
into packets or bundles in the same folder and on the same
subject. The pieces assembled in dossiers vary according to
the nature of the repertories (letters, reports, newspaper cuttings,
photographs, notes, prospectuses, circulars, printed menus,
etc.)». 74 This led to the formation of an Encyclopedic
Repertory of Dossiers which extended the other main repertories
of the OIB: the Universal Bibliographic Repertory and
the Universal Iconographic Repertory. By 1912 the material
in the Universal Documentary Repertory, as it was also called,
contained nearly a quarter of a million pieces of largely but
not entirely textual material «relative to all the objects and
all the facts which constitute human activity in its widest
extensions 75
Bibliographical, illustrative and now partly substantive,
the repertories in the OIB were further extended after Otlet's
participation in the International Congress for the Study of
Polar Regions held in Brussels in 1906, the Congress of the
Federation of Regional Hunting Societies and the International
54