THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

portant than this was the request for information about bibliographical
classification and the management of libraries from:
a young Dutchman, Firts Donker Duyvis, who had been instructed
to form a library at the Dutch Patent Office. Donker
Duyvis soon paid a visit to Brussels to cement the acquaintance
begun by letter and to study the methods of the IIB
at first hand. In Brussels he found, as has been so eloquently
described,
an institution that was trying to get itself going again after the
War; interrupted relations had not yet been resumed; subscriptions
were non-existant; the sections of the IIB no longer gave evidence
of life. In the midst of this imbroglio two men laboured, Otlet and
La Fontaine, the two idealists each of whom had sacrificed time and
money to their work. Donker Duyvis was of the same cast and decided
to put himself at the command of the two Belgians ... he was overwhelmed
by the grandness of the work, by the disinterestedness of its
founders, by the magnitude of what remained to be done, and for
forty years afterwards he did not depart from this attitude. 62
FOOTNOTES
1. G. Lorphevre, «Otlet (Paul)», Biographie Nationale (t. 32; Bruxelles:
L'Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique,
1964), Col. 553.
2. Testament — Paul Otlet, No. 18, 1918—07—10, «Celles-ci sont mes dernieres
volontes qui annulent toutes les autres», Otletaneum.
3. Henri La Fontaine, The Great Solution: Magnissima Carta — Essay on
evolutionary and constructive pacificism (Boston: World Peace Foundation,
1916).
4. In introducing Otlet to the Monday, 24 February meeting of the French
Association for the Advancement of Science, General Sebert remarked
that Otlet had taken refuge during the war «in Holland, then successively
in England, France and Switzerland*. Paul Otlet, L'Organisation
des Travaux Scientifiques, extrait du Volume des Conferences de l'Association
Francaise pour l'Avancement des Sciences (Paris: L'Association,
1919), p. 3. Otlet himself in his memorandum to the Paris Prefect of
Police in 1915 says only «I sojourned several months in Holland and
Switzerland* (See Note 16 below).
5. Paul Otlet, La Fin de la Guerre: traite de paix generate base sur une
charte mondiale declarant les droits de l'humanite et organisant la confederation
des etats (Bruxelles: Union des Associations Internationales,
Octobre 1914).
6. Paul Otlet, «Declaration des droits des nationalites (projet)*, Comte-
Rendu sommaire... de la Conference des Nationalites, organise par
l'Union des Nationalites a l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes Sociales de Paris,
le 26—27 juin, 1915 (Publication No. 6; Paris: L'Union, 1915),
15—18. The specific aims of the conference and of its commission
are set out in J. Galbrys, «La Conference des Nationalites et les travaux
de sa commission permanente», Les Annales des NationalitSs V
(1916), 11—12.
7. Paul Otlet. Une Constitution Internationale: projet presents a la Ligue
pour une Societe des Nations... (Publication, No. 3; Paris: La Ligue,
May 1916). *
217