THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

periodicals, and the multiplicity of similar (usually) fugitive literary
material in which the advances and the latest state of knowledge
are conveyed. It is a current, ever-expanding repertory of knowledge,
without any of the drawbacks of the encyclopaedia in book form,
which is obsolete in many particulars on the day of publication.
The International Library is confined to the Twentieth Century. The
founders do not suppose it to be possible for them to collect an international
library on general lines for all times; but they do think
that they can obtain a representative collection for the Twentieth
Century of every country; and this is their present endeavour.
The repertory of bibliography, the international encyclopaedia and
library form the core of the institution, and ultimately the core of
the International University, which, as M. La Fontaine remarked to
me, «has been our goal from the beginning*. The University came
into being in 1920, when 200 students attended summer courses in
international subjects under the guidance of twenty professors; this
year similar courses have been held when the numbers were doubled
in both cases. We have, therefore, another experiment here of some
significance founded, as a university should be, around a library and
a centre of bibliography. 57
Sayers was enthusiastic but others were a little more sceptical.
L. Stanley Jast, Chief Librarian at Manchester, suggested
Sayers' description had, in fact been coloured by his enthusiasm.
«It is not — of course it is not, though it might be
under happier circumstances — what I should consider to be
a working approximation to its ideal.» Jast pointed out that
in the Section for Great Britain in the Museum, half a dozen
pictures had been taken from illustrated magazines mounted,
hung on the walls and labelled «British Art». To his remonstrances,
Otlet had replied «Our idea is that we should make
a start». 58 William Warner Bishop, an eminent American
librarian, had also called into Brussels in the Fall of 1921.
«I was greatly disappointed*, he reported in reminiscences
published some twenty-eight years later,
at the showing of the Palais Mondial. The union bibliographies on
cards were not even sorted three years after the war, and a general
impression of inefficiency and confusion remained with me from which
I have not recovered, although on subsequent visits I was more favorably
impressed. 59
Perhaps, the most judicious evaluation of the Palais Mondial
at this time was made by Ernest Cushing Richardson in
the following year. Having described the various elements of
the Palais Mondial and Otlet and La Fontaine's rationalisations
of and plans for them, he said
These plans and their authors have been treated by many as grandiose,
visionary and unpractical, and have been neglected by us, but the
authors of the idea have pegged away for twenty-seven years and have
produced for the world of which we are a part, a going concern, with
all these features of real usefulness and a concrete property of organized
results. It is true that most of these are not only incomplete but
in large part only sketchy. On the other hand at almost every point
the material, so far as it goes, is organized in such a way as to be
a concrete and permanent contribution toward the respective propo-
16* 243