THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

a Society of Nations, was made. «Who expresses this propaganda
in our country at the moment?», the pseudonymous
author demanded rhetorically, «foreigners! yes, foreigners who
come to set themselves up in France in these last months under
the pretext that they are intellectuals...» One of these men
«is a Belgian pacifist*, who transposes «into French all the
woes of the Germans who pretend to have been forced to take
up arms because they had not enough elbow-room for commerce,
navigation, etc.» The argument against the unnamed
Otlet is clinched thus: «This Belgian also comes from Switzerland,
no one will dispute this point any more: he it is
who presided over the false congress of nationalities organised
by the Germans.» 19
As the War drew to a close, the movement to create a Leage
of Nations gathered strength. Otlet continued to espouse it,
but he also began to think about the future of documentation
and the Union of International Associations in the new world
order he saw emerging. In 1917 and 1918 he published a number
of articles about aspects of the national and international
co-operation he saw as necessary for the transmission of scientific
information. They summarised much of this pre-war
thinking about the fundamental role of the International Institute
of Bibliography in a world organisation of documentation.
In October 1918 a program was prepared in London for
a meeting of the Inter-Allied Conference of Academies to be
held in November of that year in Paris to consider the formation
of an Internationa! Research Council. Otlet on behalf of
the UIA addressed two resolutions to its organisers:
1. That the general plan of organisation should embrace the different
kinds of questions between which the World Congress of International
Associations has demonstrated such close links;
2. That in any organisation proposed to introduce this plan, measures
should be set down to ensure the co-operation of official bodies
with free of mixed ones. 20
He urged the Conference when it met, to study the idea of
transforming the International Institute of Bibliography into
a Union along the same lines as existing scientific unions. The
International Research Council was formally set up at a meeting
in 1919 in Brussels. Otlet submitted a memorandum to
the meeting setting out his ideas more fully and incorporating
draft statutes for the proposed Union. They were adopted in
principle.
When the Peace Conference assembled in Paris on 18th
January 1919 with its multitude of ministers, deputies, secretaries,
clerks, journalists and others, 21 Otlet and La Fontaine
were of the number. Paul Hymans, the principal Belgium Minister
to the Conference introduced a resolution that an article
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