THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

of it which had pleased him, but the printing, in fact, had been
underway for over a year. This elicited no reply, and
Nitobe sent a telegram to La Fontaine asking for details: «the
financial department is anxious to have it before Christmas».
La Fontaine explained the great difficulty encountered was
that of obtaining qualified personnel, and that one of the
Secretaries-General of the Union (La Fontaine himself, in
fact) had been able to pick up the work himself only a few
days ago. He suggested that money remaining to the Union's
credit be transferred to 1922 and expressed the hope of
completing the major part of the work before the League
Assembly met in 1922. 55
THE PALAIS MONDIAL
During a Fair held in April 1921 in the Pare and Palais
du Cinquantenaire in Brussels, two thousand visitors a day
streamed through the hundred rooms of the Palais Mondial,
«a glossy structure recalling distinctly a side aisle of the
Crystal Palace». On Sunday, April 17th the number quadrupled.
56 A party of librarians from the Library Association
of Great Britain also visited for four days beginning
15th April. They were very impressed by what they found.
Berwick Sayers has left us a vivid account of what he saw
there:
The Palais Mondial has a hall of reception where, by means of symbols,
plastdc and pictorial, the aims of the place are indicated: the
sphere symbolising unity of the world; the planosphere allegorising
the political evolution resulting in the League of Nations, a tree of
the ages showing the development of life and the conquests of the
spirit over matter, and so on. Thirty-six rooms are devoted to an
international museum of a unique type, one room being devoted to'
each country, in which are shown a large map of its territory, charts
indicating its history, political and social features, and its natural and
industrial products, together with typical pictures illustrating
these things. The student may pass from room to room gaining a
definite notion of the outstanding features of each country, and, as
many of the rooms have been arranged by the governments of thecountries
surveyed, the notion is an authentic one. The palace contains
a lecture hall to accommodate an audience of a thousand, which
hall is surrounded by smaller lecture, study and committee rooms. The
remaining rooms that concern us are devoted to the great installations
of the international bibliography, the international encyclopaedia, and
the international library. The scheme, as you may suppose, has been
planned on generous lines.
Picture a room about eighty feet long containing four ranks of card
cabinets reaching to a height of seven feet. That is the repertory
of bibliography. Two of the ranks contain author-entries, two subjectentries.
The whole contains twelve million cards. The far-away goal
of the founders is to produce a catalogue of all books and literary
pieces, of all ages and of all times...
The international Encyclopaedia is another great experiment with
tremendous possibilities. It is a vast vertical file, in which are arranged
in holders, minutely classified, cuttings, pamphlets, articles from
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