THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

The 1929 IIB Conference decided that its 1930 meeting
would be held in Zurich, Switzerland in the last week in
August. Bradford had proposed at the 1929 meeting that the
annual meetings of the now firmly reconstituted Institute
should henceforth become something more than business
meetings. They should take on something of the character they
enjoyed in earlier days and should last from four to five days
with general papers being presented at them. The 1930 meeting
was to be the first of these new kinds of meeting. Godfrey
Dewey wrote to Otlet early in 1930 to ask him to get the conference
date set back to June when he would be able to get to
Europe. At the same time he expressed his increasing sense of
dissatisfaction with the IIB. He reported that the DC office
had at last reached agreement with the Library of Congress
for placing decimal numbers on Library of Congress printed
cards, on the understanding that publication of cards could
not be delayed by the necessity of getting decimal numbers,
and that numbers once assigned and printed on the cards,
must not be altered. He continued:
This brings to a head the issues regarding the basis of co-operation
between QD and DC, arranged in 1924 but entirely disregarded by
CD ever since commencing preparation of their new edition. To facilitate
final study of the situation, a special worker on Miss Fellows
staff is devoting three months to an analytic comparison of CD and
DC which I hope I will bring with me in May.
I am greatly distressed to have no reply to my 14 November 1929
letter to you, either as regards 580 or the Mundaneum. I cannot
over-emphasise the essential importance of your adhering to the
promises given with respect to 580. If these are disregarded, it will
be beyond my power to assist further in handicapping DC in this
country by apparently futile efforts to establish and maintain concordance
with CD. 35
But Otlet was helpless. He could not take any action to change
the date of the 1930 meeting which had been set by the IIB
Council. Furthermore, he was himself becoming quite pessimistic
about the administration of the CD:
The CD is greatly extended in Europe and those who have brought
about this extension very much desire a part in its direction. This is
to tell you we have been outflanked at the Secretariat of the CD, and
it is going to result in a great disaster in the world which uses decimal
numbers, and it will find itself in full anarchy as to their application
and from this evil will come good (always in universal
history). But the good will perhaps be for others and not for us (as
often in Universal history). We ask you, therefore, to go to London
to see Bradford and Pollard ... and to meet us with Donker Duyvis
in Brussels... For my part I want complete agreement very much,
and I hope that the fact of having lived through the whole history of
the movement will permit me to exercise an influence on the decision
taken proportional to that fact. 36
When Dewey set off to Europe in 1930, Miss Fellows' study
•of concordance had been completed and her recommenda-
317