THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

ternational Committee for Intellectual Co-operation, no attempts
were made until 1928 to have resumed the shipment to
the Mundaneum of the British Museum Library's accession
slips. These shipments had begun in 1909 after official representations
to the British government from the Belgian government.
Ten years after the end of the War, which had, of course,
interrupted the shipments, all accession slips from the period
1914 to 1928 were at last sent to the Palais Mondial. These
shipments continued for two years only. 10 No attempt at all
was made to have the Library of Congress continue depositing
its sets of printed cards in the RBU, cards which had become
particularly valuable ofter 1930 when they began to carry
Dewey Decimal Numbers which would permit their being filed
immediately, or with only slight modification (given increasing
divergence between the "CD and DC) into the RBU. In 1922
Putnam, the Librarian of Congress himself, wrote to Otlet
about the cards:
The shipment of depository cards to your Institution was of course
interrupted by the War. We rather expected that when you were again
ready to receive shipments of our cards you would write to that
effect. We are advised by Mr. Ernest Kletsch, who recently called on
you, that your institution has apparently recovered from the War
period and seems ready to handle the cards again. If you are ready
to receive the cards we will send within a few weeks those that have
been issued since shipments were suspended in 1914 ..."
No action was taken on this letter at the Mundaneum and
the cards were never sent. 12 All of this suggests the validity
of the criticisms voiced by Alingh Prins and others against the
great, centralised RBU which was becoming more and more
dinosaur-like, more and more incomplete and more and more
out-of-date with each passing year.
It is tempting to speculate that at this time, an old, discouraged,
slightly bitter man, Otlet had begun to retreat from
the world of action, from the practicalities of his extraordinary
ambitious program of international organisation. Lorphevre
and Colet were beside him protectively, and around him was
a band of faithfuls. As they worked, however ineffectually,
among the collections of the Mundaneum, Otlet seems to have
turned increasingly to his own private study and writing, to
a rather reclusive life of scholarship the idea of which had
appealed to him so strongly as a young man. Then, fifty
years ago, he had been prevented from following whole-heartedly
what he had thought of as a natural bent of his character
by the necessity of working with his father to restore the family
fortune. Now after years of intermittent, but cumulatively
extensive study there was nothing to restrain him from almost
complete devotion to it, particularly no constraints of obvious
success. What seems to have been his attitude to the RBU at
this time may have been generally typical. He defended the
348