THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

ed very slowly. The repertories of the IIB were probably the
first to be set up again. By 1926 about half of the rooms of the
Museum had been reconstituted. 5 In 1927 a valiant effort was
made to re-install the Library before the opening of a Conference
of the IIB, called that year at the Palais Mondial. The
effort required exhausted Otlet. 6
The year 1924 marked a turning point, then, in Otlet's
career and in the fortunes of the institutions he had created and
called the Palais Mondial. He was forced to recognise their
precariousness in Belgium and had to look abroad for help. The
supporters of the IIB were also forced to consider their own
attitudes towards these institutions. The IIB was the oldest and
intellectually, at least in terms of Otlet's rationalisation, at
their centre and their collapse as a whole would certainly bring
it down. The supporters of the IIB were, therefore, faced with
the alternatives of attempting to resuscitate it separately from
the other institutions, or of reviving them all. For Otlet his institutions
were one, parts of a whole, inextricably linked by intention
and in effect. In his view there could be no real separation
of one from the others without violent harm being done to them
all. Yet this view required a commitment to his philosophy of
synthesis rather than to a demonstrable fact and some saw no
necessity for the commitment. At the end of 1923, for example,
when eviction from the Palais du Cinquantenaire seemed certain,
Masure, the IIB Secretary, and Losseau, that old and tried
supporter of the Institute, were convinced of the necessity of
extricating the IIB from the ruins of the Palais Mondial.
A newspaper article had made a comment to this effect, «conforming»,
Masure wrote to Losseau, «exactly to what we desired».
He added wryly, «needless to say, the article made Otlet
hop who wants at no price to separate the two organisations*. 7
In June 1924, after the bouleversements of the Rubber Fair
in Brussels, a group of members of the IIB met formally in The
Hague under the chairmanship of La Fontaine to consider the
future of the IIB. Nine of the seventeen participants were from
Nider (Nederlandisch Instituut voor Documentatie en Registratuur).
Two matters were before the meeting: a draft of revised
statutes for the IIB, and a constitution for an International
Committee for the Decimal Classification. The aims of
the IIB as stated in the revised statutes were:
1. To improve and unify bibliographical methods, especially classification;
2. to organise co-operation to elaborate or form works and collections,
especially the Repertoire Bibliographique Universelle;
3. to establish, for this, an international center for co-ordination;
4. to permit intellectual workers to use the collections, especially by
providing copies and extracts;
5. to multiply bibliographical and documentary services in all countries.
18* 275