THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

American support could be obtained, the sections dealing with
«the sciences of the mind». 12 The IIB Council discussed the
Dutch proposal to decentralise the RBU and finally adopted
it. The Bibliographical service provided by the IIB was thereupon
entrusted to the English Section for all matters dealing
with science and technology. The Palais Mondial was left
with the rest.
This was, in fact, a sensible recognition of what had
already taken place in London. In 1926 the Science Museum
Library in South Kensington had received a large corpus of
bibliographical material from the Bureau Bibliographique de
Paris. Bradford, who had then succeeded to the Deputy
Keepership, decided to cut up and intercalate with this material
all bibliographies in the Library bearing decimal notations,
thus forming, in Otlet's terms, a comprehensive national
bibliographical repertory in the pure sciences and technology.
A well organised information service with adequate staff and
institutional backing was set up in the Library in relation
to this repertory. 13 Bradford had been an enthusiast for the
UDC since his earliest years in the Library. Indeed in 1900
he had the «impudence» to suggest that the UDC be used
for the Library's Catalogue. He was then a junior «of some
eighteen months' experience*, and, not surprisingly, was turned
down. 14 He bided his time for a quarter of a century
until he was in a position to order his suggestion carried out.
He saw one of the major aims of the British Society for International
Bibliography, which he and Pollard had founded in
1927, as publicity for the UDC and its widespread adoption by
indexing and abstracting journals so that material published
by them would have classification indices accompanying entries
and could be eacily cut up and inter-filed in catalogs like
that of the Library of the Science Museum. 15 In all of this
Bradford closely followed Otlet, whose influence he acknowledged,
though he repudiated Otlet's wider pre-occupations. 16
There was about all of this discussion of the Repertory
at the 1928 Cologne Conference something contrived. Pollard
was merely reporting to the Conference a modified form of
views communicated in more detail and with more frankness
by Bradford in several letters to Gilbert Murray, now Chairman
of the League's Committee on Intellectual Co-operation, in an
attempt to stimulate further League support for the IIB.
Having been made aware of League distrust of the IIB,
Bradford had exclaimed of the situation: «I did not know that
it was still so bad». He agreed that Otlet and La Fontaine
were «delightful personally but lacking in tact». He continued,
however, to believe and to stress the point to Murray, that
they were the authors of the only practical scheme of inter-
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