THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

oping the classification by introducing a series of letters for
geological formations and for geological time periods. In the
midst of the Office's search for techniques for extending the
classification's notation and of making it capable of greater
flexibility and specificity than it seemed to have, Carus,
foreseeing where all this might lead, sounded a note of warning.
«One should remember», he said, «that the decimal notation
is a means of registering bibliographic facts and nothing
more. One should therefore avoid attempting to express
by numerical indices the scientific results contained in a publication.»
29
The Marquis Daruty de Grandpre, taking into account the
suggestions made in Otlet's «Objections and Explications»,
presented a succinct description of the mechanics of the classification
and how he proposed to extend it by using recurrent
bracketed geographical numbers and the colon for his work on
a bibliography of the African Islands of the Southern Indian
Ocean. 30 A note was added to this article, most probably by
Otlet, about the possible use of the plus ( + ) sign in the classification
of documents with multiple subjects, 31 an idea which
may have been derived from suggestions made by Simoens of
the Belgian Geological Service, who was working on the tables
for geology. Simoens had thought up a scheme for achieving
what was called «bibliographic analysis of documents*
by multiple indexings, the classification number obtained on
each occasion of indexing being joined to each of the others by"
the plus sign. 32
Otlet, drawing on all of this, made a major theoretical
statement in his «On the Structure of Classification Numbers».
which represented a summing up and distillation of the various
proposals received at the Office on the subject. 33 He intended
that this article should complement the Rules and his
«Objections and Explications*. It represented a step towards
a definite decision on still controversial aspects of the classification.
Otlet based his examination of classification numbers
on the observation that certain ideas were recurrent in all
parts of the classification, such as the historical, geographical,,
and form categories already discussed by him in various places
and derived more or less directly from Dewey. A similar
observation was true of individual branches of the classification
where subdivisions seemed regularly to recur. Each species
in zoology, for example, could be envisaged from many
similar points of view. «The consequence of this observation is
that classification numbers should have a structure such that
to each category of modifying ideas which periodically returns,
there should correspond a distinct appearance and permanent
signification.» 34 For Otlet there were now two ways of building
classification numbers. One was to juxtapose complete num-
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