THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

valuable advantages, especially, without abandoning the stability of
the classification and depriving specialists of a certain latitude to
develop the classification according to the needs of the various
sciences. 48
The Manual revealed that the various problems and difficulties
that Otlet had begun to struggle with in «On the
Structure of Classification Numbers», a struggle reflected in
the subsequent publications of the Office, had at last
been resolved. The common subdivisions were increased
to six in number — form, time, relation, proper name, place
and language, and a special sign was given to each. The form
divisions were finally returned to parentheses, to distinguish
them clearly from analytic subdivisions indicated by the intercalatory
zero and to associate them clearly with the other
common subdivisions. 49 The subdivision, time, was taken out of
parentheses and placed between French quotation marks, «»
guillemets. The «simplest form of the principal determinant*,
the juxtaposition of whole numbers joined by a colon, was now
simply called the «relation subdivision*. The language subdivision
was reinstated and was indicated by an extended equals
sign or double dash, = The geologic, place, politico-geographical
subdivisions were all, as before, regarded as related
and derived from the geographic tables. Geologic time was to
be indicated by (1...), aspects of place or physical geography
by (2...), and political geography by the well-devloped (3—9)
subdivisions of the geographic tables. The extended tables for
the common subdivisions were appended to the end of the
Manual. The use of the various punctuation signs would, of
course, make filing very difficult and a conventional filing
order was established as: (), «», :, A—Z, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,5,6,7,8,9,
proceeding from right to left. 50 The = sign was omitted
from this formula, but was intended to follow the colon and
precede the guillemets. 51 It is interesting that the plus sign
( + ) was still maintained for works with multiple subjects as
Otlet and Simoens had first suggested several years before —
961.1+965, History of Algeria and Tunisia. In such a case the
cards for the work would be filed under each number, the +
sign and the number following it being ignored in filing. This,,
in a sense, provided a kind of «subject tracing note», informing
the user that a work on a certain subject also treated another.-
But the necessity of using this sign rather than the colon and
subdivisions of relation seems questionable. It was further
suggested in the Manual, that the apprehension by a user of
the subject display of cards in a repertory could be facilitated
by the use of divisionary cards arranged according to a colour
code:orange for a specific subject and subdivisions of relation,,
blue for the form divisions; green for subdivisions of place;.
yellow for subdivisions of time, and so on. 52 95