THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

more than the titles of the millions and millions of works
that they would thus catalog. He recognised that enumerative,
uncritical bibliographies had begun to multiply prodigiously,
and that some form of co-operative approach to
bibliography had become necessary. The Royal Society had
made this latter point quite clear. But all these ventures,
co-operative, enumerative and uncritical though they might
be, were specialised. Even the Royal Society had limited itself
|o ;i the area of the sciences. It would-have been much better^
in his view, if Otlet and La Fontaine had been content to
devote themselves to forming a Bureau of Legal and Sociological
Bibliography. In such a limited area, in considerable
need of organisation, the Belgians might have had some hope
of success. The tone of Langlois' article was slightly disdainful
and at the Institute it was called a philippic. 22
It is clear that the professional librarians and bibliographers
of France could not accept Otlet and La Fontaine's
proposals for mainly two reasons. The first turned on their
attitude to the Decimal Classification, and the second on their
attitude towards the idea of a universal catalog. In their
discussions of both they were deeply influenced by prior
knowledge and experience. Their principal objection to the
Decimal Classification was not that it was imperfect, for,,
though this was a fact they were anxious to demonstrate at
length, no one would have undertaken to deny it. Rather, the
claims made for it seemed to imply that older classifications
should be thrown out, and with them should go the old bibliographical
order itself in which they had fully vested interests.
They responded therefore to the glowing account the Belgians
gave of the potentialities of the classification by declaring
flatly and at once that by no means did it represent the coming
of a bibliographical millenium. Nationalist and professional
fervor surged through their pens as though from the
threat of some aggressive imperialism as they advised caution.
On the other hand, they brought to their study of the
International Institute of Bibliography and the Universal
Bibliographic Repertory a full but inhibiting knowledge of
similar schemes tried or projected elsewhere at other times.
Now that the catalogs of the great national libraries of
England and France, The British Museum Library and the
Bibliotheque Nationale, were at last being printed, the librarians
of Europe were all too ready to share the conviction of
those directing the production of these catalogs that they
could naturally and simply be transformed into the long hoped
for, panaceatic, universal catalogue. But, quite apart from the
universal catalog a bibliographer for them was an erudite
and discriminating man who frankly acknowledged boundaries
to the areas of his competence. Within these boundaries,
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