THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

PREFACE
Paul Otlet was a pioneer both of international organisation
and of documentation. He and his colleague Henri La
Fontaine, created two international organisations which continue
to flourish: the International Federation for Documentation
and the Union of International Associations. He also
had some impact both in the movement to create the League
of Nations and on its Committee for International Intellectual
Co-operation. He was something of a visionary whose ideas
were at least fifty years ahead of his time in laying the
foundations for what has become known as Documentation,
then Information Science in the United States of America,
and now Informatics in Europe, especially in the USSR. His
pioneering efforts in creating and elaborating the Universal
Decimal Classification laid a firm foundation for the continued
cooperative development of that Classification. His speculations
showed him sensitive and imaginative in anticipating,
technological innovation, such as microfilm, and many of his
wider schemes may be considered to have failed mainly
because the computer had not been invented, though another
reason must not be neglected: the indifference of governments
to problems of co-operation in the dissemination and bibliographic
control of information. Nowadays, with the computer
and the work of UNESCO and the International Council of
Scientific Unions, Otlet's visionary schemes may yet be
realised through UNISIST.
The present work is a first study with all the faults on
its head that this involves. It has been prepared by relying
heavily, almost exclusively, on masses of original documentation
kept in an institution in Brussels (a kind of Otlet
archive) called Mundaneum. It is carefully, perhaps overly,