THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

Otlet wrote to Nitobe and others thanking them for their
support at the League's Council meeting. In his letter to Leon
Bourgeois he expressed the importance of the events of
1920 thus:
We cannot wait to tell you how precious your sympathy has been
for us. Here we are installed in a vast edifice put at our disposal
by the Belgian government, where it is possible to show by the results
already obtained in the collections already gathered ... the significance
of a quarter of a century of sustained effort. It is very satisfying
to us and to our numerous and modest collaborators, who have been
animated by the same faith as ours, to observe that the highest
authority now existing in the world has not hesitated to give it
encouragement ... !4
THE FIRST QUINZAINE INTERNATIONALE
The first Quinzaine Internationale, for which the King
agreed to be Patron, 15 seems to have been a success. The
move to the Palais du Cinquantenaire was more or less completed
by the time it opened. The International University was
well attended by students and professors alike. Fifty professors
from eleven countries discoursing in at least four languages,
French, English, Spanish and Esperanto, delivered 106 hours
of addresses divided into fifty-three courses to about a hundred
formally enrolled students and to about a hundred «auditors».
16 Nitobe after some hesitation was instructed to lecture
on the League and various other members of the League's
Secretariat attended as auditors to particular sessions of interest.
17 The conference formally to constitute the University
adopted the statutes proposed by Otlet for it. On several
occasions when debate became involved and angry about the
name of the University, the possible problem of national bias
and the perfidy of some German scientists, Otlet intervened
to great applause with fervent and elevated expression of his
hopes for the University. When all was satisfactorily done,,
both Otlet and La Fontaine praised and congratulated, Otlet
declared:
Renan has defined patriotism as the sentiment which unites men of
one place by the memory of great things done together and the hope
of accomplishing more of them. When one can say this of humanity,
when, thanks to the great international foundations, and notably this
University just constituted, all men on the whole of the earth will be
united by this sentiment, by the memory of great things done together
and the hope of accomplishing more of them, that day will mark
the beginning of a new era and I hope that we will have contributed
here to its coming (sustained applause). 18
There were delegates from Holland (Donker Duyvis was
one), Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Italy, Poland and
France to the Conference of Bibliography. There were no
delegates from England (the Library Association was meeting
at the same time as the Conference of Bibliography), and only-
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