THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

constituted on the basis of a vast co-operative society whose members
should be all those interested in the creation of the universal
repertory: states, public administrators, scientific associations, libraries,
publishers, authors and men of letters. This Office should publish
a universal repertory on cards classified by the Decimal Classification.
All existing bibliographic material should be fused in the
(repertory; local bibliographic centres open to all should be created in all
cities arid in all intellectual centres, and should receive continuously
from the Central Office all the bibliographic notices printed on cards.
These local offices should be set up in all large libraries where soon
they would be merged with the catalog department, today so costly to
maintain and of such incomplete usefulness.
3. A Bibliographic Union should be formed between governments
who will encourage the development of the repertory by subscribing
to copies of it proportional in number to their respective populations
and the amount of their annual literary production. 19
The conference was rather hurriedly organised. A little
more than six months after they had first examined the Dewey
Decimal Classification, Otlet and La Fontaine had decided on
what was to become, for Otlet at least, a lifetime program, and
they pressed ahead with it with they utmost dispatch. In that
six months before the end of July 1895 when the invitations
went out for an international conference to assemble in Brussels
on the 2nd of September, barely one month later, they had
studied the classification, translated parts of it, begun to modify
it, alerted many of their colleagues in Belgium to their
•enlarged bibliographic ambitions, and had set about classifying
the bibliographic notices already collected at the Office
of International Bibliography, notices which they suggested
should become the basis of the proposed universal repertory.
By the time they had finished their note, «On the Creation of
a Universal Bibliographic Repertory*, presumably printed in
time to accompany the invitations to the conference or not long
after, they had classified 200,000 notices. 20 By the time the
conference closed they had brought the number to 400,000. 21
They were assisted in this work by La Fontaine's sister, Leonie.
Above all, in this period the two friends set turning that
machinery of acquaintance and influence which, socially and
professionally, they were in such a good position to exploit.
The eminent financier, Ernest Solvay, 22 was prevailed upon to
give financial support. The Belgian government offered its
patronage through the Ministry of the Interior and Public Instruction,
and Edouard Descamps, a distinguished politician and
lawyer, undertook to preside at the Conference. 23 As a result,
the invitations were endorsed by the Belgian government and
the conference assumed a semi-official character calculated to
give its deliberations, directed with authority and held in comfortable
surroundings in the Hotel Ravenstein, a weight they
might not otherwise have had.
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