THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

merit, contrary to the interests of international scholarship as well as
well as to its public obligation to your Institut. 8
Pollard agreed that the RBU could be administered
separately from the IIB in Brussels. Moreover, he declared
that the British Society for International Bibliography welcomed
«the prospect that the League of Nations may support
or even temporarily adopt the repertory and hopes that there
may result from this not only a useful differentiation of
functions, but also improved relations between the sister
institutions of Brussels and Paris». But he warned against
any move to Geneva unless the League would not support
the RBU otherwise. The RBU, said Pollard, needed to be
administered in connection with a great national library in
some important centre of population and research. The most
appropriate places for it, if it were to be moved, were Paris,
London, Oxford, Berlin or Rome. 9 Later, at the IIB Conference
in Cologne, Pollard formally proposed to transfer the RBU to
London. The IIB Assembly, however, supported Otlet's conclusion
that «Geneva is the best solutions*, whereupon Pollard
withdrew his proposition remarking that, «at any time, if it
should be necessary, the Repertory would receive a refuge in
England.* 10
The Dutch section of the Institute (Nider) came up with
an entirely new solution for the problems posed by the
Repertory and an information service based on it. At the
time J. Alingh Prins was President of Nider, and the Dutch
report was signed by him and Nider's Secretary G. A. A.
de Voogd. It was provoked by Otlet's General Report to
the IIB. 11
Prins and de Voogd attacked Otlet's general principle of
centralist organisation, an attack which, when repeated more
intensely a few years later was to bring the Institut to a
crisis of organisational philosophies and the prospect of a
schism. They expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of
material in the classified sections of the RBU and estimated
that the number of scientific and technical periodicals in
existence was about three times the figure estimated by Otlet.
The information service in the Palais Mondial was poor, they
asserted, partly because of the lack of material on which it
was based, but also partly «because of the incompetence of
the personnel*. They proposed, therefore, that the bibliographical
services of the IIB should be decentralised and organised
on a federative basis. The English section, in their view,
would be the best to develop the sections for the pure and
applied sciences because of the existence already in Kensington
of the Science Library with its great catalog. The central
section at the IIB Headquarters, on the other hand, would'
be the best section to maintain the Author Repertory, and if"
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