THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

ture» 24 was pregnant with all sorts of possibilities for precise,
flexible, specific description and classification of documents,
it was not until 1899 that the classification was developed to
such an extent that it exhibited clearly what were to be regarded
as its characteristic features: procedures for the introduction
throughout the whole classification of highly elaborated
analytic common subdivisions.
As early as 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine had decided toabandon
the convention of the American classification of placing
the decimal point after a number always composed of
three figures. «Is the whole number», Otlet wrote to Dewey,
«a decimal, or a whole number plus a decimal point after the
third figure?» 25 He concluded that it was better to regard the
whole number as a decimal, and to consider the decimal point
as serving primarily as a mark of punctuation. In his view, the
use of the point in this way would facilitate the reading of a
number and better indicate «the order and succession and subordination
of ideas» in the number. Carrying the analogy of
punctuated numbers yet further, he had begun to wonder what
could be done with parentheses and the colon. «In a general
way...», he continued his letter, «we came to this rule: the decimal
classification is a system which permits the noting of all
bibliographic categories by means of concise symbols, figures
whose signification and value depend upon their position, and
upon certain signs of punctuation which accompany them.» 2ti
In his «Objections and Explications* Otlet gave a brief explanation
of what the figures in a classification number meant,,
of how a number could become the basis of further development
by generalising its signification without violating the
principle that new numbers must not conflict with old ones,
and suggested how the point, colon and parentheses could be
used for combining or modifying numbers. 27
As the Office's collaborators moved more deeply into their
work of developing the tables and using them in the preparation
of bibliographies, they began to appreciate inadequacies in
the classification's notation and obscurities in the current explanations
of its application and use. They began to offer ingenious
suggestions for improvements to make the classification
responsive to the difficulties that they had variously encountered.
Marcel Baudouin, for example, working on the tables
for medicine, reached the conclusion that the use of the
decimal point after the third figure of a number was useful
only if the number were relatively short. He devised a system,
followed thereafter at the Office, of using long numbers broken
up into constituent parts by the use of more than one
point. He also drew up a detailed system of parallelism for
the pathology of organs and for diseases and operations. 2 *
Victor Carus followed up Dewey's own suggestions for devel-