THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

In general, the Rules stressed the importance of preserving the
simplicity of the classification, and reminded collaborators of
the classification's facility for combining and recombining
numbers, a facility which could be used on occasion to obviate
the necessity for creating new numbers. They were also reminded
of the symmetrical and mnemonic features of the classification
and were urged to develop and extend them, even where
parallelisms might not in fact be complete and numbers
would be, for the time, unused.
With these very general rules to follow, a distinguished
•group of scientists and scholars began to work on various tables.
Most notable among the collaborators were Herbert Field
•of the Concilium Bibliographicum and Charles Richet, editor
of the Revue scientifique, a physiologist at the university of
Paris, and later a Nobel Laureate. The interests of the scientists
connected with the Concilium Bibliographicum and of
those belonging to the French Section of the IIB (Richet and
Baudouin among others) probably explain the early translation
•of the American tables for the medical sciences. These were
soon taken up and revised. The Concilium Bibliographicum
published a brief pamphlet containing the tables for zoology
in 1897 with an index in French, English and German. 10 Later
that year the first extension of the tables for anatomy appeared,
11 and in the next year those for zoology. 12 Richet worked
•on the tables for physiology and these were published by the
Concilium Bibliographicum, also in 1897. 13 Other groups,
however, were working on other parts of the classification. At
the time of the conference, the Institut Superieur de Philosophie
at Louvain (to which de Wulf, and Otlet's old friend,
Thiery, were attached), the Belgian Society of Astronomy, and
the Belgian Geological Commission (headed by Moulon) had
pledged their help, both to develop the classification tables in
their areas of interest and to apply them to the notices in periodical
bibliographies which they would undertake to publish.
14 In the next few years the tables for philosophy, 15 geology,
16 astronomy, 17 as well as those for railway science 18 and
photography 19 made their appearance. In 1897 the Office itself
prepared and published the recast General Abridged Tables of
the classification 20 and these were immediately translated into
Italian, 21 Spanish, 22 and German. 2 ' 1
The distinctive pattern of the Brussels classification emerged
only very slowly from the American classification. The essential
differences were to lie in the development in the Brussels
version of the notions of parallelism, of mnemonics and
number-compounding adumbrated in the 1896 Rules and in
other material prepared at the same time at the OIB, but not
fully explained in any of it. Though for Otlet the notation of
the classification, what he called its «bibliographic nomencla-
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