THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

v bad work w wh I know CD t be permeated, my general ground for
distrusting it all.»
Donker Duyvis, dismayed by her attitude and the difficulties
of reconciliation of the two editions after the appearance of
the 1927 American edition, proposed that CD should go its
own way independently of DC. Miss Fellows' comment t»
Godfrey Dewey was brutally frank:
I wish f bottom v my hart th hd gon th own way 30 years ago, t
extent v laying out a skeme v th own. Probabli I h wisht 100 times
during last 7 yrs tt I IB nvr had herd v us, wh z vr uncharitabl, be
th nvr wd h got aniwhere without us.
Godfrey Dewey, however, tenaciously opposed her with
his belief in co-operation:
The most important new thought is to work toward a single bibliographic
edition bilingual with French and English on facing pages,,
publisht preferably by I IB leaving our library editions as the fullest
publisht by us independently.
So strong did Dorcas Fellows' opposition to the IIB grow
that her animosity began to be directed towards Godfrey himself,
its champion. Melvil Dewey, nearing the end of his long
life, 33 was forced to intervene and held two conferences with
them to clear away the differences. Negotiations were underway
with the Library of Congress at this time to have decimal
numbers placed on printed Library of Congress cards. The
Library of Congress required great speed in the provision of
numbers and that once they were printed they could not be
changed, so that the IIB had to accept changes of expansions
made at the DDC Office or face «consolidated» divergence.
At the 1929 IIB Conference, Donker Duyvis gave his
version at attempts at concordance and the troublesome problem
of the tables for 580. He observed that
316
In the new manual we have made important alterations in order to
approach unification with the American edition of the DDC. In their
last edition our American friends have made only very few alterations
in our direction, but they have introduced various extensions based
on the international CD, sometimes with the same numbers and
sometimes not.
Now, in one respect we have caused new discordance. In botany we
have introduced the system of Prof. Engler which is at present the
most widely used standard system for botanical classification. Our
main object was to fix a definite place for every plant, so that in cases
of doubt about the classification of some specimen, the Engler manual
might give the decision... Our American friends keep strongly
to the out-of-date Bentham and Hooker system, which, in the form
in which it was published in the last American edition, is certainly
not utilisable for scientific classification. Recently our American colleagues
have expanded the Bentham and Hooker system in order to
make it fit for practical use. Personally, I think the result of this
very careful work does not meet the reguirements of assigning a definite
place to every specimen. 34