THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

views expfessed at its meetings and the complexity of the
subject eventually led the Committee to decide to appoint
a sub-committee to consider the matters involved. The Sub-
Committee as constituted was to meet under the chairmanship
of Bergson, and was to consist of Destree, Madame Curie-
Sklowdowska, and from three to five co-opted experts. Later
in the year four experts were appointed to the Sub-Committee,
all but one of them librarians.
When Bergson closed the first series of meetings of the
Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, he observed that their
initial achievement was essentially that of having isolated
questions to be settled, of having defined a program for
further study. As the Committee reported to the League
Council:
The international organisation for scientific documentation, particularly
bibliography, is essential for all intellectual co-operation; scientific
relations are very intimately connected with this question. For
this reason, the world of science unanimously desires that such an
organisation may be established as soon as possible. The Committee
therefore gave this priority over scientific research and interuniversity
relations. 20
Otlet reviewed the Committee's deliberations with no
satisfaction at all but with great suspicion and then with a
kindling anger. Reporting to the International Associations at
the beginning of 1923 on the UIA's relations with the League,
especially with its new Committee, Otlet observed that Nitobe
had referred to the UIA in an address which opened the
work of the Committee, but it had received no other mention.
No one, not even Destree, had been prepared to recognise
that the UIA had already created the basis for an international
university and an international library. The idea of this library
receiving its material from the operation of an international
deposit regulation had been part of the UIA's plans for the
development of its library, and had been discussed in its World
Congresses of 1910 and 1920. Moreover, the foundations of
an international center existed at Brussels and the possibility
of the Committee's building upon them, which should have
been fully explored, was completely neglected. In fact, even
the general idea of the value of such a center to the Committee
had hardly been discussed at all. It was true, he acknowledged,
that the work of the IIB had been drawn to the attention
of the Committee, but the Committee had also apparently
rejected the IIB as the basis for the organisation of bibliography
and documentation, of the necessity for which it
appeared to be convinced, and, after a number of proposals,
only the most general resolutions about bibliography in no
way clearly involving the IIB, had been adopted. Otlet's bitter
conclusion was that a second phase had now begun in the
relations of the UIA with the League in which
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