THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

1908 and got down to work. The documentary union was the
last item on the agenda, culminating as it seemed to do, the
rest of the program. A great deal of territory was . • covered
before it was reached as various delegates reported on projects
of immediate interest to them or on bibliographical conditions
in their countries and on the state of organisations associated
with the IIB (such as the specialised Institutes).
James Duff Brown 92 from England was caught out by a request
for an account of the work of English public libraries and,
refusing to make an impromptu address on the subject, made
some generally affirmative noises about the program to be
prepared for the 1910 conference and some doubtful ones about
the possibility of international bibliographical standardisation.
93 One important discussion centered on administrative documentation,
a subject of long standing interest for Otlet, and
he prepared a general paper for the conference on «Documentation
in Administration*. 94 He raised the problem of administrative
documentation at the conference, he said, not because it
was the proper moment to discuss it in any detail, but because
it was the first time that it had been raised in a conference of
bibliography and he hoped that in future it would become an
integral part of IIB conference programs. He noted the
tendency for greatly increased use of documents in administration
and the provision by government offices of more and
more information. He believed that the IIB's methods were extremely
appropriate for the control and organisation of these
documents, especially the work it had done on «dossiers». Nowadays,
he observed, increasing use was being made of scientific
information in government. The methods of the IIB permitted
the development of integrated documentation services
for administrative purposes and he declared that administrative
documentation was as important a field of study as scientific
and technical documentation, the requirements of which
had received most attention to that time.
In September 1906, the IIB had exhibited at an Administrative
Exposition, the Tentoonstelling op gemeentelijk Administratief
Gebied in Amsterdam. Here the problem of classifying
and arranging the administrative documents and archives
•of local government organisations was emphasised. In
.Zaandam, in Holland, systematic attempts were being made to
use the IIB's methods in communal administration. Two representatives
to the Conference from Zaandam, the mayor and
the town clerk, described what was being done. An association
had been formed in Holland to consider the problems of administrative
documentation, the Nederlandsche Vereeniging van
Gemeente Belangen, and there was some hope that an International
Office of Administrative Documentation might be formed
160