THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

work should be analagous to that undertaken by the International
Association of Academies for developing the Encyclopaedia
of Islam. 79 The problem was not so much a question,
he believed, of a new kind of special work, but of giving a
«methodical form» to work that should have to be undertaken
anyway. The association devoted to the study of the Polar
regions, and by extension to any area of scientific work,
«could not, in an objective manner conforming to the requirements
of science, establish a methodical plan of exploration,
nor formulate a detailed scientific program, nor publish
in an up-to-date form the results obtained, if it did not
proceed to a preliminary analysis and indexing of existing
docurnents». 80 In all of this Otlet was in fact making the leap
from bibliography through documentation to the notion of
encyclopedia adumbrated by and partially explored in his
early paper Un pen de bibliographie.
Reports on several of these «sections», or «affiliated institutes»
were made to the International Conference on Bibliography
and Documentation called by the IIB in 1908. 81 A total
for all the institutes of slightly over 210,000 items was indexed
in the period to 1912. Much of the work was apparently
retrospective, indexing and excerpting beginning for certain
journals and treatises in the 1860's. As a result, by 1912 the
latest indexings were for the period 1908 or 1909, in many
cases earlier. These dates suggest either a gradual slowing
down of work by 1912, or the inability of the Institutes to
keep up-to-date, given the volume of the work to be done
because of the retrospective dates at which it had initially
begun. 82 It was necessarily slow as it involved excerpting
which was done painstakingly by hand as there was no
mechanical copying apparatus.
Otlet attempted to develop a service for technical information
in the OIB. This led him to formulate his ideas on the
need for new kinds of information services more clearly than
before. Technical information, he observed, was available in
a great many forms: in great encyclopedic treatises, in separate
and particular monographs, in periodicals, annuals, formularies
and tables, collections of patent specifications, official
publications and in pictorial form. A «primordial need» was
now being felt, he believed, for «annotated, precise, rapid, easy,,
up-to-date, integrated and specific documentation*. This
had been true for a long time, but was now truer than ever
before as far as men of action were concerned.
156
Everything is discussed, everything is examined anew. Progress, reforms,
improvements burgeon from the contact of men and things. It
is necessary to stabilise them, control them, adjust them. For this it is
necessary to have information, immense quantities of information. This
exists already collected in innumerable public documents. But it is
necessary to offer it in relation to demand. For this new organs are
necessary,