THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

kind and another, it lacks «a sure method of investigation and
control, and a good method for classifying its materials*.
The natural sciences, Otlet suggested, provide an illuminating
point of comparison. Their conclusions have been rooted
in millions of carefully observed facts which have been integrated
in such a way as to lead to laws of gradually increasing
generality. There seems not to be in the natural sciences
that duplication of effort everywhere present in the social
sciences. The student works in an orderly way from what is
known, and what has been newly discovered is recorded immediately
so that it is accessible to others as the basis for
further development.
The problem to which Otlet now addressed himself, a problem
which was to provide the foundation for his life's workwas:
To examine whether facts once stated and consigned to publications
(becoming in this way part of science), it would be possible by means
of some special classification, to group them into laws. How could one
give to the social sciences the positive and documentary character
of the natural sciences? How could all the activities of individuals be^
made to contribute to the elaboration of a definitive synthesis, gradually
established from facts and results, not from the speculations of a
single thinker, but from the research of all?
Would it be too difficult, he asked, to achieve a «registration
of sociological facts and ideas similar to that required in
every industrial country for the patenting of inventions*? His
answer was a carefully reasoned no, not if one could secure
the cooperation of scientists in a program of increasingly
complex and analytic bibliographic activity.
The exterior appearance of a book, its form, the personality
of its author are ultimately of little importance, he contended.
What matters is its substance which should be conserved
and become part of the «organism of science*, something impersonal
created by the work of all. «Science, indeed, is only
the grouping of all observed facts and of all probable hypotheses
suggested to explain the facts and reduce them to
laws.* How to co-ordinate the efforts of individual scientists
so that their work could become part of a rational collectivity
above and beyond them, and yet not circumscribed by it — this
was the problem.
The first step in the bibliographic program designed by
Otlet to give to the social sciences «the positive and documentary
character of the natural sciences* was to establish
a «scientific» classification of sociological source materials
and then to publish a catalog of them. Such a catalog
should be organised alphabetically by authors' names, and
systematically by subject. The materials listed in this catalog
should be indexed and abstracted to provide access to the
information in them. 17 Subsequently each book, each article
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