THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

American edition of the classification. 56 A cursory examination
of the copy sent him by Dewey «grieved and bothered* him
because of the further evidence it provided of the widening
gap between the American and European versions. He expressed
again the bitter pre-war complaint that with divergence
«we lose the benefit of the immense effort we made in 1895
to graft developments on to your tables, despite criticisms that
could have been made by those who adopted them. What should
be done?» 57
Otlet painted a most favourable picture of the IIB's postwar
prospects and discussed some of the difficulties in
faced:
It has come through the war materially unharmed, and sympathy for
it increases. At the Inter-Allied Conference of Academies last July,,
the Institute was adopted as part of the new scientific machinery
(International Research Council). The conflict with the Royal Society
has been smoothed away, and we negotiate directly with the League
of Nations (Sir Eric Drummond) so that IIB should become an International
Bureau for Bibliography and Documentation recognised and.
assisted by the League (Art. 24 of the Covenant). A diplomatic conference
will probably be held to examine the question. But there are
three difficulties:
1) We have not had a reply to our appeal from the Americans who were
assured that they had very good friends in us. The movement for
universal documentation should be the work of the Americans and
our Institute (Belgium—America). When our ideas triumph and becomethose
of the whole world, we will be released from collaboration and
we will no longer work together;
2) We are rich in future hope, and poor at the present moment. Noresources
even for beginning to publish our Bulletin again, all being
absorbed by interior services! The French tables of the Classification
Decimale are exhausted and we cannot reprint them;
3) We need more concordance between DC and CD. This is serious
for us who have attempted to edit a very detailed classification on
the former trunk of the DC, so serious that the question has been
raised as to whether we should go to the official conference with the
old classification, or whether we should give way to various people
who demand a quite new classification. It is certain that our argument
that real unity exists between Europe and America is strongly
compromised by the discordance recently created. 58
There can be little doubt that Otlet's suggestion that the
Institute might abandon the Decimal Classification was merely
a threat and in 1920 a very brief «Alphabetical Summary
Index» to the divisions 62 to 69 of the classification appeared,
59 together with a short account of the classification and
the re-impression of the first thousand divisions. 60
Two other bibliographical matters called for Otlet's attention
as 1920, that busiest of years, broke around him. In March
he was invited to Rome to survey the documentation services,,
needs and collections of the International Institute of Agriculture.
He spent more than a fortnight at this work and the
report of his study was published in 1921. 61 Much more im-
216