THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

solutions, I cannot even interest them in my way of expressing the
problem .. .
Never mind! As it is a question of standardisation and not of science,
1 bow to the vote of the majority. Everything that was said at The
Hague now exists, and your counter-draft will be printed. But if
I have to accept it from a practical point of view, from a theoretical
point of view 'I look for a diversion for my «sadness» and my «discontent»
by laughing at the really «comica!» situation we have reached.
One can be right on each point and detail and be wrong as to the
whole ...
My expose showed at the same time the problem and the proposed
solution. It attempted to show the complexity in things themselves
-and not in the proposed system and it attempted, on the other hand,
to justify what the system makes relatively complicated by the
multiplicity of subproblems, the desiderata which it meets. On the
contrary .. . you enunciate a series of prescriptions with no explicit link
attaching one to the other and yet you ask that they be remembered
and applied in the mind of the novice whom you have plunged into
a global impression of extreme complication. 73
As the year progressed, matters worsened. Early in June
1932, Alingh Prins wrote to La Fontaine requesting financial
information. The Assistant Treasurer had attempted to draw
up a financial report on the IID for the forthcoming Frankfurt
conference but found he lacked certain data. The problem was
the relationship of the finances of the central Office International
de Bibliographie to those of the Institute. Was the Belgian
Government's subsidy to the Office to be construed as
part of the Institute's finances? 74 La Fontaine, Senior Vice
President of the Belgium Senate, much occupied by his other
internationalist concerns, did not reply to Alingh Prins's
first letter. Nor did he reply to a second letter written a month
later. Alingh Prins then brought the matter up before the
Frankfurt conference whereupon «M. La Fontaine replied formally
that the International Office of Bibliography was completely
separate from the IID and that the IID Council had
neither power nor responsibility with respect to the management
of the collections and expenditures in Brussels». As a
result, the Council assumed that they were two different organisations.
Otlet, however, who had decided to attend despite
the prospect of unpleasantness, considered that, despite repeated
interventions by him, Alingh Prins had deliberately
instigated a formal decision at Frankfurt by which the Office
and the Institute were severed from one another. 75 He was not
to change this opinion.
Furthermore, not only had Alingh Prins tried to separate
Office and Institute (at least in Otlet's eyes), he had spoken
out against the RBU. 76 Indeed, Otlet was dissatisfied with the
whole way in which the conference had proceeded. There had
not been prior agreement on the program. Important people
had been officiously excluded from the meetings of the Institute's
various commissions if they were not members, when
331