International
Organisation and
Dissemination of
Knowledge
Selected Essays of Paul Otlet
Translated and Edited with an Introduction
by W. Boyd Rayward
ELSEVIER
International
Organisation and
Dissemination of
Knowledge
International
Organisation and
Dissemination of
Knowledge
Selected Essays of Paul Otlet
Translated and Edited with an Introduction
by W. BOYD RAYWARD
School of Librarians hip
University of New South Wales
Kensington, N.S.W., Australia
~m
FID 684
1990
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface v
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1. Something About Bibliography 11
2. Creation of a Universal Bibliographic Repertory: A Preliminary Note 25
3. On the Structure Classification of Numbers 51
4. Rules for developing the Decimal Classification 63
5. The Science of Bibliography and Documentation 71
6. On a New Form of the Book: The Microphotographic Book 87
7. The Reform of National Bibliographies and Their Use in Universal Bibliography 96
8 The Systematic Organisation of Documentation and the Development
of the International Institute of Bibliography 105
9. The Union of International Associations: A World Centre 112
10. Note for M.Durand, Prefect of Police 130
11. The Organisation of the Society of Nations 136
12. Transformations in the Bibliographic Apparatus of the Sciences 148
13. On the Organisation of Intellectual Work by the League of Nations: Report and Resolution Presented by the Union of
International Associations 157
14. The International Organisation of Bibliography and Documentation 173
15. The Preservation and International Diffusion of Thought;
the Microphotic Book 204
16. 28th Universal Peace Congress: The Belgian Appeal to the World 211
17. Henri La Fontaine 214 Bibliography of the Works of Paul Otlet 22 1 Selected Bibliography of Sources used in Editor's Notes 248 Index
PREFACE
These translations of a selection of Paul Otlet's writings have been a long time in preparation. Now put down, now taken up again over a period of ten years or so in Chicago, London and Sydney, they are dispatched at last to Amsterdam with relief. They follow an earlier biographical and institutional study of Otlet and the International Institute of Bibliography (now FID, the International Federation for Information and Documentation).1 The publication of that work left me with a troubled sense of more that needed to be done, of an obligation incurred but not yet discharged.2 It has always seemed to me that, though not entirely neglected, Otlet's contributions to our understanding of bibliography, documentation and what is now called information storage and retrieval, sometimes information science, and the technical and institutional arrangements needed to maximise their social utility, have not had the attention in the English-speaking world that is their due. It is my hope that the availability of this selection of papers in English, both in themselves and because of the attention that the act of publication can engender, will encourage a renewal of interest in Otlet's thinking about and work for the international organisation and dissemination of knowledge.
There are 17 papers in this volume. Most are short; all are complete in themselves but one, which is excerpted from a much larger work. Though I have arranged them in chronological order, they are essentially of three kinds. The first group comprises papers directly related to theoretical and practical matters of bibliography and documentation. They rai.ge from Otlet's first published thoughts on these subjects, "Something About Bibliography" in 1893, to "The International Organisation of Bibliography and Documentation" some 27 years later. Included here are two visionary papers on the documentary uses of microfilm written in collaboration with a remarkable inventor and engineer, Robert Goldschmidt; the first appeared in 1906, the second in 1925. I have not attempted to excerpt Otlet's magisterial and, in its detail and density, rather overwhelming Traiti de Documentation of 1934. A reprint of the original French edition was issued in 1989 so that it is currently available in this form. It should be translated into English but that is a task for another.
A second group of papers deals with matters of international organisation in general (which also includes the organisation of bibliography and documentation) and in the context of what was to become the League of Nations and its Organisation for International Intellectual Cooperation. No appreciation of Otlet's life and work is possible without an
W. Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. FID Publication 520; Moscow: VTNTTI, 1975.
W. Boyd Rayward, "The Times of Their Lives: A Personal Reflection on Biography and history," Proceedings of the 4th Forum on Library History. Clayton, Vic: Monash University, 1990 (in press).
x Paul Otlet
awareness of his passionate, Utopian internationalism and his tireless organisational activity in this domain especially in the decade before, and the period during, the First World War.
The third group of papers is included because their more personal tone allows us to glimpse something of the shadow of the man himself. Here he is, having sent two sons off to the War, one lost in the Battle of the Yser, the other captured by the enemy and later interned in Switzerland, having to explain his presence in Paris in 1915 to the Prefect of Police. His internationalism in wartime was widely misinterpreted. Denounced in the French press and the subject of rumour among certain Belgians in exile as a pacifist and possibly traitorous, he faced conflict with the authorities (Paper 10, "Note for M. Durand, Prefect of Police").
In July 1931 the 28th Universal Peace Congress met at the Palais Mondial, that phantasmic, grandiose international centre that Otlet and La Fontaine had somehow conjured into a semblance of being as early as 1910 in the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Otlet used the occasion to issue a "Belgian Appeal to the World" (Paper 16) in which he expressed his anguish at the direction of the events of the time, invoking in grandiloquent style the institutional solutions he believed would save mankind from itself. The congress was meeting as it were on the eve of the International Disarmament Conference which was to end two years later in irredeemable failure.
Finally, I have included Otlet's tribute to Henri La Fontaine on the occasion of the latter's 80th birthday (Paper 17). The two men had begun to work together in 1892 or 1893 and, companions and colleagues, they continued to develop ideas, and the organisations in which these ideas were embodied, from then on. Such a community of intellectual interests, political and social conviction, and action must surely be rare. In the history of the enterprises they initiated and so assiduously developed together for some fifty years, it is hard to disentangle their different responsibilities and contributions. Otlet's tribute encapsulates that lifetime of collaboration and mutual regard which ended only with La Fontaine's death in 1943.
In this connection, it is necessary to be aware that Otlet was an active and for some time influential man of affairs. He was also a scholar whose intellectual and organisational commitments were international and pan- disciplinary. In the Editor's footnotes to the papers in this volume, I have tried to provide as necessary a context, explanation, point of reference, clarification for what is mentioned, sometimes quite casually, in the text The reader will come across references to obscure bibliographers ancient and modern, and publications of various kinds ancient and modern, as Otlet elaborated an historical context for his speculative, innovative ideas. He travelled widely in neutral Europe as the War dragged out its terrible course. He was in Paris while the Treaty of Versailles was negotiated (La Fontaine was an official representative of Belgium at the Conference of Peace). I have tried to identify events and issues that he mentions in passing as he might have understood them at the time. Sometimes I have a footnote on a footnote of his so that the reader will have some idea of what he is referring to. Sometimes there seems to be an error or obscurity in a reference or comment that he makes and I have discussed this in a footnote. I have particularly kept in mind what might help the understanding of the student who, in the course of his or her professional studies, might come upon this book from any one of a number of different backgrounds. Hence I have boldly included a note, for example, on the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas and on Aristotle as well as notes on Zech du Biez, Henri Morel, the Bulletin des Sommaires and the regime of the Scheldt River. I confess I enjoyed the sleuthing that a number of the notes involved. I hope they will be useful. Tucked away at the end of each paper, they can, of course, be ignored.
Preface xi
"The Bibliography of the Works of Paul Otlet" at the end of the book is as complete as I have been able to make it. I have included one or two items I have found in "near- published" form in various libraries. It is a much fuller and more accurate bibliography than that in my earlier book. This contains a number of errors and omissions that are, in part my own fault and, in part, the result of the process of publishing in a country that was then effectively closed so that communication with the publisher was well nigh impossible save for an occasional telegram. I have a particular debt of gratitude in relation to the completion of the present version of the bibliography to M. Bruynseels of the Bibliotheque Albert Ier in Brussels, who, when I was on a rushed trip, arranged for me to have access to that library's stacks to search through runs of various periodicals, conference proceedings and so on for Otlet publications. The search for items in the last year or so has taken on a life of its own and has been great fun. M. Andr6 Canonne of the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communaute" fran^aise in Liege contributed and so did Mr. Ben Goedegebuure of FID Headquarters in the Hague. I offer special thanks to M. Pieter Uyttenhove, now in Paris, who is studying urban reconstruction and development in Brussels after the two wars. He has sent references, found and copied articles for me and in general has helped strengthen my faith in the international community of scholars.
I have not tried to compile a complete bibliography of secondary source materials. There is a voluminous literature on the Universal Decimal Classification which I have for the most part ignored. What is included in the secondary list has been of particular interest to me either in or of itself or as representing a special kind of contribution. I have also included a selected list of sources I used in compiling the Editor's notes. In some places in the notes themselves I have included full references and they are not reproduced in mis list.
At the University of Chicago, I had two splendid research assistants who have probably forgotten that they were involved in the inception of this project: Joyce Saricks and Kathleen Prendergast. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Gerry Byrne for help with organising the typing of preliminary drafts of much of this material. That this book exists at all is owing to the enthusiasm and conviction of Stella Keenan, former Secretary-General of FID and to the continuing interest and support of Ben Goedegebuure, Executive Director of FID. Professor K.V. Sinclair of James Cook University in Queensland, with a generosity and cheerfulness I have long appreciated, has offered advice on particular issues of translation that I brought to him and has checked the bibliography for me. Nadia Kemfe of the University of New South Wales has also helped with problems of translation. Lesley Payne of the State Library of New South Wales has helped with proof-reading the text. Ann-Maree Walsh of the School of Librarianship at the University of New South Wales has been wonderfully patient and skilful at the word- processor as various revisions have been presented to her. Above all I salute Ray Locke of the School of Librarianship for help with the physical preparation of the text, help, as with all he does, that far exceeded the bounds of duty. A small Special Research Grant from the Faculty of Professional Studies at the University of New South Wales provided the funds needed to complete this project and for such mercies I am most grateful.
While acknowledging the various kinds of help I have received from the wonderful friends and colleagues mentioned above, I hasten to add that any errors that remain in this work are my responsibility alone.
W. Boyd Rayward, February, 1990
ABBREVIATIONS
FID Federation International d'lnformation et de
Documentation/International Federation for Information and Documentation
1 1 B Institut International de Bibliographic/International Institute for
Bibliography
OIB Office International de Bibliographic/International Office of Bibliography
RBU Repertoire Bibliographique Universel/Universal Bibliographic Repertory
UDC Universal Decimal Classification
UIA Union of International Associations
FOOTNOTES In Otlet's papers his footnotes are indicated by numbers in square brackets, [ ], in the text and appear at the bottom of the page. They are in the form in which they appear in the original papers.
The Editor's Notes are indicated by a superscript number and are placed at the end of each paper.
INTRODUCTION
We must bring together a collection of machines which simultaneously or sequentially can perform the following operations: (1) The transformation of sound into writing; (2) The reproduction of this writing in as many copies as are useful; (3) The creation of documents in such a way that each item of information has its own identity and, in its relationships with those items comprising any collection, can be retrieved as necessary; (4) A Classification number assigned to each item of information; the perforation of documents correlated with these numbers; (5) Automatic classification and filing of documents; (6) Automatic retrieval of documents for consultation and presented either direct to the enquirer or via machine enabling written additions to be made to them; (7) Mechanical manipulation at will of all the listed items of information in order to obtain new combinations of facts, new relationships of ideas, and new operations carried out with the help of numbers. The technology fulfilling these seven requirements would indeed be a mechanical, collective brain}
A... radical assumption would consider that all knowledge, all information could be so condensed that it could be contained in a limited number of works placed on a desk, therefore within hand's reach, and indexed in such a way as to ensure maximum consultabihty. In this case the world described in the entirety of books would really be within everyone's grasp. The Universal Book created from all books would become very approximately an annex to the brain, a substratum even of memory, an external mechanism and instrument of the mind but so close to it, so apt to its use that it would truly be a sort of appended organ, an exodermic appendage.2
Man would no longer need documentation if he were to become an omniscient being like God himself. A less ultimate degree would create an instrumentation acting across distance which would combine at the same time radio, x-rays, cinema and microscopic photography. All the things of the universe and all those of man would be registered from afar as they were produced. Thus the moving image of the world would be established - its memory, its true duplicate. From afar anyone would be able to read the passage, expanded or limited to the desired subject, that could be projected on his individual screen. Thus, in his armchair, anyone would be able to contemplate the whole of creation or particular parts of it3
Who is Paul Otlet? Why should we be interested in what he did or tried to do and in what he wrote? He was a Belgian. His original profession was the law, though he soon turned to matters of bibliographic organisation and the organisation of non-governmental international relations. He lived from 1868 to 1944. A long life, its heyday, however, was the turn of the century and the period before the First World War. In the few photographs we have, most of them taken towards the end of his life, he is a slightly stooped old man. He peers out at us squint-eyed, heavy-lidded, through small, thick, round spectacles. His face, framed by a bushy but neatly-trimmed, snow-white beard and moustache is grave, unsmiling, its
1. Paul Otlet, Traiti de Documentation... 1989 (see "Bibliography of the Work of Paul Otlet" in this volume for
bibliographic details) p. 391
2. Ibid, p.428.
3. Paul Odet, Monde, 1935, pp. 390-391.
2 Paul Otlet
expression more bitter than impassive. The photographs project an old-fashioned image, for those of us in middle age perhaps that of a long dead grandfather. What can he have to say to a society caught up in an information processing revolution so rapid in its development, so far reaching in its consequences, so complex and sweeping in the changes it is creating that it seems a hurricane of modernity? For the electronic youth of today, members of the microchip generation, he must appear incredibly ancient
Yet, as the quotation at the head of the Introduction suggests, he proved to be prescient to a remarkable degree in anticipating the need for revolutionary kinds of technological development for accessing and manipulating information. He also realised that such developments would stimulate the setting up of new, and the expansion of old, forms of information services and that new kinds of organisational structures would be required to support them. He saw that radical re-thinking was needed if science, and learning more generally, were to continue to move forward freely and swiftly without becoming bogged down in the huge physical bulk of existing publications. He was vitally aware that, because of its escalating rate of production, its international character, its substantive and formal complexity, this ever-growing body of literature constituted, as it still constitutes, an increasingly impenetrable barrier to understanding and use. Derek de Sola Price was to designate it one of the diseases of modern science.4
For Otlet, then, key questions were: how best was order to be introduced into this proliferating, disorderly mass in such a way that progress in the world of learning could continue efficiently and effectively? How could rapid developments in all areas of knowledge, so characteristic of the modern period, be mobilised for the benefit of society? How could the international flow of information, then obstructed (as it still is) by political, social and linguistic barriers on the one hand, and by cumbersome, unresponsive systems of publication, distribution and bibliographic processing on the other, become more open and more effective? How could accurate, up-to-date, "integrated" information tailored specifically and exactly to particular needs be derived from this mass, re-worked to a form ensuring immediate and optimal usefulness, and made available without hindrance or delay, whatever such potentially infinite, unpredictable needs might be.
In his very first paper on bibliography (No. 1 in this volume), Otlet struggled to formulate questions of this kind and to examine possible answers to them. Literature both embodied what was known and hid it. The ultimate objective of bibliography was to identify what a work contributed to knowledge, to help disentangle what was true from what was false, what was objective from what was subjective, what was useful as theory and interpretation from what was idiosyncratic conjecture and misguided, and to record this contribution "atomistically" on cards so that the record could be manipulated in whatever ways were necessary to ensure immediate availability for use. He uses an image of "winnowing the best grain." How could the intellectual domains be adequately, continuously "mapped," a metaphor he was to use frequently. Such a mapping was necessary to promote international cooperation and to avoid duplication in research. To understand what contributions bibliography could make, an historical examination of the development of bibliography and a study of its current status were necessary. For Otlet a complete catalogue of sources, "the materials" of a field, was a first desideratum. If a catalogue were to be developed on cards and arranged in classified order, then achieving the important objectives
4. Derek J. de Sola Price, Science Since Babylon, new ed; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961 .
Introduction 3
of collective work, currency, immediate access both to what had been done and what was being done, became possible along with sensible planning for future developments. But beyond this, other bibliographic processes had to be introduced. He concluded that what was needed at the outset as a basis for subsequent bibliographical development was "a very systematic and a very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge. "Jj
Otlet and his colleagues studied literature proliferation and its social and institutional consequences in considerable depth. They hoped to create a system of intellectual statistics that would allow these phenomena to be monitored and mechanisms of bibliographic control to be introduced in a planned way.5 While it was not until the advent of UNESCO's Statistical Yearbook that some of these figures began to be assembled internationally on a regular basis, it did not take Otlet long to become clear in his own mind as to where potential solutions to problems of organising access to and facilitating the use of knowledge were to be found. For him these solutions lay in technology, bibliographic or "documentary" standards and the creation of a hierarchy of organisational arrangements of ever-increasing generality. These arrangements embraced methods of printing and publication, the work of international associations, bibliographic procedures, the re- structuring of libraries and library systems to constitute part of an international communications network, and the coordination of libraries, archives and museums as information resources within this network.
Otlet' s ideas on these matters provided him with the basis for an attempt to conceptualise and develop a new field of study and research, which as early as 1903 he took to calling "documentation." He suggested that documentation should be concerned not only with written and graphic records but objects as well because they had a "documentary" value. Of interest was anything that could convey potentially useful information no matter what form it took. He was led to envisage a form of documentary organisation whose levels and processes would ensure the provision of information through revolutionary information services or "offices of documentation". These would draw as needed on text, image, or object as sources of information and, linked together by common methods, shared tasks and formal agreements, their existence would transform libraries into stations in an information network reaching around the world. Their essential business, closely co-ordinated with archives and museums, would be information derived from all the immense variety of printed and other sources that were available. New documentary techniques and new kinds of documentary tools would be brought together in these offices in order to provide rapid, effective "consultation", which Otlet identified as a new information function for which new kinds of provision were needed. In effect these offices of documentation would become a new form of encyclopedia in which movement from bibliography to document to re-structured, re- codified knowledge would be made possible.
These ideas grew out of and, in a process of reciprocal interaction, were embodied in and tested against a series of actual institutional developments in Brussels. First was the creation of what might be described as a vast, cooperatively elaborated database. Initially this was bibliographical, the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. It grew from about 400,000 entries in 1895 to 3,000,000 entries in 1903 to 11,000,000 by the outbreak of War in 1914.
See Paul Otlet' s own studies in 1899 and 1901, for example. Most important, however, is B. Irwinski, La Statistique intemationale des imprimis: IIB Publication No. 109; Bruxelles, OIB, 1911 (also published in I IB Bulletin 16(1911): 1-39
4 Paul Otlet
Very quickly it was given a full-text and "image" or iconographic dimension in the form of a parallel Universal Iconographic Repertory and the prototype of a new kind of "encyclopedia", an Encyclopedic Repertory of Dossiers (or files). The physical ordering of these databases and the provision of access to their contents were handled by what was in effect a highly sophisticated software package. This has gone through many revisions and up- grades in most of the major languages, at least of the Western world, since its original release in 1896, and is still in use. It is the Universal Decimal Classification. The first edition of UDC in its new form, as developed from Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification by Otlet and his colleagues, was issued in the period 1904-1907 in a volume over 2,000 pages in length. It was the first of what are now called faceted classifications and a complex apparatus for number compounding and subject specification (see papers 3 and 4 in this volume) was devised for it
An international organisation was created in 1895 among other things to sponsor the database, coordinate the development of the software and provide a commercial search service based on them (See Paper 2 in this volume). The International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) became the International Institute of Documentation in 1931, the International Federation for Documentation in 1937 and is today known as the International Federation for Information and Documentation, FID. The Headquarters of the IIB, an International Office of Bibliography (OIB), was supported from its foundation as a quasi official agency by the Belgian government, a link that was not fully severed until 1980.
As new services and publishing initiatives were begun at the International Office of Bibliography in the period after 1905, a more general organisation was created around them. The Union of International Associations or UIA was formally created in 1910 after a great World Congress of International Associations. At the enlarged centre supported by the UIA, an International Library, an International Museum, an International University and a Central Service for International Associations were set up beside the documentary services of the IIB (See paper No. 9). After the War, all of these services, institutes and offices comprising what Otlet dubbed the Palais Mondial, later the Mundaneum, were transferred by the Belgian Government at considerable expense (500,000 francs) to the Palais du Cinquantenaire.6 Eventually these locations became the subject of considerable dispute between the UIA and the Government which resumed parts of them temporarily in 1922, most of them temporarily in 1924 and eventually closed the Palais Mondial entirely in 1934. This was by no means final and in 1939 the government agreed to make the locations available once again, but the outbreak of War prevented the resumption of occupancy. The collections were transferred to an old anatomy building of the University Libre de Bruxelles on the edge of the Pare Leopold. Here, in the Rue Maelbeek, the Mundaneum was set up again and functioned, in an extremely circumscribed way, beyond Otlet's death in 1944.7
The UIA, effectively moribund after 1924, was revived after World War II and continues to perform important work especially as publisher of the Yearbook of International Organizations, a huge and now indispensable reference work continuing the Annuaire de la
6. All of these developments are dealt with in some detail in W. Boyd Rayward, The Universe of Information... Moscow: VINrn, 1975.
7. It was here that the Editor was able to consult the archives and other records of the IIB for his biographical study of Otlet He has described the richness of the sources and the picturesque but heart breaking disorder and decay in the locations in his "The Times of Their Lives: A Personal Reflection on Biography and History" Proceedings of the Fourth Library History Seminar...Clayton, Vic: Monash University, 1990 (in press).
Introduction 5
Vie Internationale that had been published in 1909 and 1911 under the auspices of the international centre in Brussels. The IIB, on the other hand, was re-constituted in 1924 and gradually took on a separate life under its English President, A.F.C. Pollard in 1928-1929. It was revitalised also in part by the energy and commitment of a third Secretary-General after 1928, the Dutchman, Frits Donker Duyvis, who brought it successfully through the Second World War. Under these influences it became independent of the Palais Mondial and what had become the somewhat stifling influence of Otlet and was to function actively and effectively until the interruption of the Second World War.
Otlet's legacy to his posterity is complex. He bequeathed us international associations that have successfully adapted to changing times and needs, and continue to exist - the FID and the UIA, responsible respectively for major bibliographical products developed by Otlet and his colleagues, the UDC and the Yearbook of International Organizations. The contemporary failure of other organisations, presumably to some extent at the time misconceived and maladaptive, is of great interest to the historian, as are the adumbrations of the functions of a number of modern organisations that show no obvious influence but conceptually are related to initiatives Otlet and his colleagues took in the first part of the century. The work of the International Institute of Bibliography in aiming to develop and coordinate indexing and abstracting services internationally, essentially through what was at the time called the Bibliographia Universalis, is paralleled today by the input plan and other work of the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), previously known as the International Council of Scientific Unions Abstracting Board. There may well be an irony here in that, when the International Council of Scientific Unions was established in 1919, Otlet secured approval for the creation as part of it of an International Union for Documentation whose Statutes were actually drawn up. For reasons that are obscure, nothing further came of this initiative. Otlet's aspirations for a world network of cooperative bibliographic and information services are echoed in the General Information Programme of UNESCO. Insofar as he also dealt with the need for compiling official national bibliographies according to internationally adopted standards in a way that would facilitate the international exchange of bibliographic data (see paper No. 7), he was anticipating aspects of the programme for Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). IFLA's headquarters in another of those ironies of history is now located in the Dutch national library just down the hall from the FID Office but the modern programmes of the two organisations are essentially uncoordinated and unrelated.
The work of the UIA in attempting to provide an international framework for intellectual relations was an important influence on the League of Nations in setting up its own general organisation for that purpose. This was the direct forerunner of UNESCO. Both FID and UIA are now affiliated with UNESCO in ways that Otlet, though he failed miserably at the time, had attempted to achieve for them with the League of Nations.
Another legacy is what remains of the much disturbed collections that were so painstakingly developed in the OIB and the Palais Mondial. The OIB, a semi-governmental instrumentality, continued to exist legally until 1980 when its collections as they were then understood to be, essentially what remained of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, were transferred to the Belgian national library, the Bibliotheque Royale Albert Ier. The other collections were considered to be vested in Les Amis du Palais Mondial, a group of disciples and volunteers that had been incorporated in 1930 to protect the interests of the Palais
6 Paul Otlet
Mondial and to work among its collections. The remainder of these collections were transferred by Royal decree in 1985 to the Centre de la Lecture publique de la Communaute* rrangaise (CLPCF) in Liege. Essentially here were what remained of the International Library, the collections of the Mus6e de la Presse, the files of the Encyclopedic Repertory of Dossiers and the Iconographic Repertory, and above all the archives of the Institute and the personal papers of Otlet and La Fontaine. Thus did the door finally close on the enterprises that the two friends had begun so hopefully in 1895 and which had lingered on for over forty years after their deaths!8
The final aspect of Otlet's legacy, however, is a body of writing for which a bibliography is provided in this volume. For his posterity the ideas represented in his writing have a particular interest both in themselves as statements of aspiration and of interesting and important insights, but also as statements in some sense embodied in and tested against organisational realities in a way that is perhaps unique, though little remains physically of these "experiments".
His ideas need to be understood in their "organisational" and historical context His mind was very strongly shaped by the traditions of late 19th Century evolutionary positivist thought He saw unceasing generalising processes of organisation at work. In the political and social world these processes were precipitating new kinds of institutions and relationships. In the intellectual world of ideas, they were shaping the growth of knowledge. He brought this frame of mind to his thinking about problems of documentation and international organisation. It led him to formulate the arguments of his papers and books in a particular way. A preliminary statement would be examined against historical developments. These would seem to suggest evolutionary goals that he would express in very general terms, often as prescriptively formulated desiderata or requirements. That these were plausible and not unrealistically grandiose or theoretical would then be suggested by an examination of recent developments.
His "philosophical" background also determined his somewhat mechanistic view of knowledge and of the document; he seemed to consider the latter capable of being shelled of its bits of information rather like a bag of peas. But this approach is not unrelated to that required for information processing by computer.
Indeed, this view of knowledge led Otlet to formulate what he called the "Monographic Principle" according to which separate items of information were to be recorded separately or "analytically" to use his term. The use of cards, generalised later to include the loose sheet or leaf as well, permitted continuous intercalation and international cooperation in creating the various databases that he and his colleagues attempted to set up in the International Office of Bibliography. The use of the minute subject divisions of the UDC helped to define and relate subject headings where entries either for bibliographic references or for actual information would be placed. Moreover the indexing of materials to be included in the bibliographic database on the one hand or the "partitioning" of documents to be
It is very much to be hoped that the plans of the CLPCF for the creation of an Espace Mundaneum in Brussels - or in any other centre - will come to fruition. The archives, papers and other "documents" that have been rescued but, after decades of neglect, are continuing to deteriorate further in inadequate storage, are of enormous historical and cultural value for scholars of the international movement, Belgian social history, and an enormous range and variety of other subjects, organisations and persons that the UIA and II B and their personnel were associated with around the world but particularly in Europe over a fifty year period. That these resources of research are currently unavailable is a serious hindrance to scholarship and one hopes that the Belgian authorities will be able to find a way to make them effectively available again.
Introduction 7
included in the encyclopedic repertories according to the "monographic principle" on the other, could be at any level of detail: the whole document, chapters, sections and so on, down to "facts" which the indexing procedure would "detach" from the text of a document The subsequent manipulation of cards and sheets, their organisation and re-organisation led him to envisage the reconstitution of knowledge contained in documents in a flexible encyclopedic way - what he called "codification". Hence Otlet's recurrent images of "mapping" knowledge, of dissecting or disintegrating documents and re-constituting them, of creating a minutely detailed table of contents and index of the "Universal Book of Knowledge", as well as an institutional expression of that "book" as a new form of "Encyclopedia."
This highlights two aspects of Otlet's work that are of particular relevance today: his anticipation of computer processing of text and his imaginative extrapolation from the hints provided by the technology of his own day, to a vision of the revolutionary changes a more sophisticated technology could make in improving access to and use of knowledge. Indeed, it is possible to claim that what he had himself discovered in 1895 was a new technology based on the standard card and loose-leaf or sheet, permitting mass storage of information, and a procedure for sorting and retrieving all that was stored: basic functions of computer processing. He had found a way to transcend the limitations that inevitably arose from the existing technology for communicating knowledge - using the printing press to produce separate, physically unrelated units such as books or issues of journals or periodicals. Cards and loose-leaves or sheets of a standard format led him to conceive of a new kind of book and file and catalogue that was infinitely and continuously expansible. The UDC with its complex system of encoding subjects ordered this file for searching. Ostensibly it also allowed for precise, flexibly formulated search statements. Search parameters could be set for point of view, date or language, and the other common sub-divisions, for example. The use of the + and : signs for establishing conjunctive relationships between separate subjects could be construed as functioning like the Boolean operator "and." The database, the file of cards or loose-leaves and later microfilm strips or microfiche, indexed by the same system, could be sorted against these statements and matches retrieved - either bibliographical entries or actual text.
While on-demand searches were made in the Universal Bibliographic Repertory from its beginnings until it became unavailable in the early 1970s, the theory and the practice were from the start at odds. The RBU was in fact subject to the same limitations as manual searching of any card catalogue or indexed "paper-based" file. First there was the problem that the sorting/matching process was limited by the need for pre-coordination in indexing. The classificatory machinery by which highly sophisticated subject specification became possible was not available for searching - the number elements of the UDC were not in fact entirely reversible, nor were multiple entries automatically made in the Repertory to take advantage of those that were. In addition the contents of the "documents", the facts and so on that were identified as needing to be made separately available on the basis of the "monographic principle," had to be physically extracted from the document itself either by laborious manuscript transcription or by cutting and pasting. This destroyed the integrity of the original and the possibility of other kinds of analysis, manipulation and reconstitution of the text that had not initially been anticipated. In machine-readable form, however, the integrity of the original record or document can be maintained or restored while its content
8 Paul Otlet
can be manipulated at any time in any way that the available software and the ingenuity of the operator allow.
Otlet's imagination was fired by the possibility of having text available in a form in which it could be searched, analysed, abstracted and re-formatted at will. His "monographic principle" and the "deep" indexing it implied by freeing the content of a work from the work itself, were thought to allow individuals to identify what I have referred to as atoms of information that could be re-configured in any way corresponding to their own particular interests and needs. But here arose a problem of communication and of storage. How to gain access to these elements, how to retrieve and copy them and how to store the copy locally for personal use become important questions. In thinking about these matters, Otlet effectively described what is now called the Scholar's Work-Station in which these and related functions are - or will be - carried out electronically, though Otlet's description of them was of course in terms of the technology of his time.
In a striking passage not two full pages in length in his Traiti de Documentation he discusses machines not yet invented but which he believes were necessary if certain requirements for access to and use of information were to be met9 He speculates about new forms of printing and about creating new kinds of machines for photocopying, even pocket- sized personal copiers. He wonders about creating illustrations from previously established basic units of design (a process similar to modern computer-aided design). Aware of the Hollerith "statistical" machines in use in the Bureau of the Census in Washington (see paper 12 in this volume), he considered the applicability of punched card machines and techniques to the sorting and retrieval of documents. He believed that a machine was needed to translate voice to writing and vice versa. A "telereading" machine would allow text to be read at a distance, while a "telescription" machine would allow the transmission of writing for addition to remotely held texts without having physically to disturb the originals. He believed that somehow it should be possible for scholars on their screens at home to read documents held at a distance in the great depositories (of course reorganised along the lines that he saw as necessary!), to which they would be linked by wire, like a telephone, or not by wire, like the radio and newly introduced television. Later in the Traiti de Documentation he also speculated, in what he described as a way that would appeal to H.G. Wells (p.428), that perhaps the work-desk of the future might consist only of a screen or multiple screens and a telephone to call up documents automatically on the screen for consultation, along with some kind of "loud - speaker" for the transmission of sound when this was needed to augment the visual display.
These machines as a whole constituted a kind of auxiliary intellectual apparatus of contemporary scholarship. He believed that a new work environment would become necessary in which these machines could be brought together physically, their functions coordinated, their size reduced; ultimately they would be fused into a single machine. Within this new workroom there would be new kinds of desks or work tables both to accommodate the new technology but also new approaches to scholarly work that would now be possible. Desks would have different writing surfaces for different projects (perhaps like electronic windows) from which relevant documentation could be kept accessible and undisturbed. For storage and retrieval of documents in general, Otlet suggested that there should be a great mobile filing cabinet mounted on a straight or circular rail next to or around the desk and
9. Otlet, Traiti de Documentation... pp. 389-391 .
Introduction 9
controlled electrically: a physical surrogate if ever there was one for electronically stored files and a database management system.
In this connection one should also stress Otlet's concern for the storage possibilities of microfilm (See papers 6 and 15 in this volume). Otlet believed that microfilm could be used to bring within reach of every scholar vast quantities of information either in the form of copies of existing catalogues and libraries of books, music, images etc or in the form of reconstituted information comprising a new approach to the Encyclopedia - what he was to call the Encyclopedia Microphotica Mundaneum.
While Otlet's casual reference to Wells is merely to highlight his sense of the science fiction-like character of his own speculations, it should be noted that Otlet's ideas for a new kind of encyclopedia and for a world documentary network preceded by several decades Wells's own statements about a "World Encyclopaedia" as discussed in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind in 1931 and in the papers published as World Brain in 1938. 10 The two men were star "performers" at the Paris World Congress of Universal Documentation sponsored in 1937 in part by the League of Nations Organisation for International Intellectual Cooperation. It was as a result of this Congress that the name, International Federation for Documentation, was adopted for what had become the International Institute for Documentation. It is not clear if Wells and Otlet actually met on this occasion or ever became aware of the close kinship of their ideas for organising access to knowledge internationally.11
It also seems clear that Otlet anticipated the kinds of organisation and technology that were to inspire Vannevar Bush's "Memex".12 In the "monographic principle" and the idea of the reconstitution of documents, moreover, is a hint - but only very remotely a hint - of the associative and relational trails that each scholar would establish amongst the sources of interest to him. Thus, Otlet's notion of a mechanical brain, a substratum of memory, an external mechanism and instrument of the mind are anticipations of the functions foreseen by Bush for his Memex. Other work, such as that of Douglas C. Engelbart13 and the development of the currently fashionable hypertext systems, may also be considered in broad outline and functionality as having been anticipated by Otlet. In this connection it is not irrelevant to note that, in following his notions of "documentation" to their ultimate conclusion, Otlet was to speak of "Hyper Documentation" in terms only slightly more extravagant that those used by hypertext enthusiasts.
One can make too much of these anticipations. They are the speculative culmination of his extensive (and repetitive) analysis of the nature of documents and of organisational requirements needed to facilitate access to the knowledge that was their freight In the long run what is perhaps most important in Otlet's thought is his comprehensiveness of approach, his extraordinary vue d'ensemble. He conceptualised a field of a study and research that is concerned not with separate institutions but with the related functions that a number of different kinds of institutions perform. Thus he sees bibliography, libraries, archives, museums and a new kind of institutionalised "encyclopedia" all as expressing functions that
10. H.G. Wells, World Brain. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1938.
11. W. Boyd Ray ward, "The International Exposition and the World Documentation Congress, Paris, 1937" The Library Quarterly 53 (July 1983): 254-268.
12. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" Atlantic Monthly 176(1945): 101-108.
13. Douglas C. Englebart "A Conceptual Framework for the Augmentation of Man's Intellect," in Vistas in Information Handling edited by Paul Howerton. 1 (1963) 11-29.
10 Paul Otlet
have devolved upon "the document." But the document Otlet also conceives of in a new way as being anything conveying information, principally written documents of all kinds but also "things" as well, depending upon the uses to which conceptually they were put This notion helps produce a coherence and amplitude to what in the English-speaking world are still fairly circumscribed areas of study, research and professional education, though broadened in recent years as information science or information management Thus for Otlet the document is at the centre of a complex process of communication, of the cumulation and transmission of knowledge, of the creation and evolution of institutions. It is in this breadth, this sense of a whole, this catholicity of approach that Otlet has most to offer us. 14 It is this that it is hoped the papers presented below will bring before a new generation of readers.
14. In this respect see W. Boyd Rayward, "Library and Information Sciences: Disciplinary Differentiation, Competition and Convergence" in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. Edited by Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. New York: John Wiley and sons, 1983. pp 343 - 363, and also Rayward, "Library and Information Science: An Historical Perspective," Journal of Library History 20(1985): 120-136.
1. SOMETHING ABOUT BIBLIOGRAPHY1
The debasement of all kinds of publication resulting from the modern cultivation of the so-called moral, social and political sciences is alarming to those who are concerned about quality rather than quantity. What is original in all of these books, brochures, and journal articles, the publication of which is announced each week in publishers' catalogues and in reviews in specialist periodicals? What allowances must be made for style and repetition and what is really new?
A delicate but necessary question.
If one spends a very little time reading these works, it seems that everything has been said, that everything to be said is known and that further reading is pointless. This belief has a companion state of scepticism, the consequences of which are deplorable. Seeing that so much is based only on opinion, one is constrained to believe that the pros and cons of any question can be sustained equally well and that the facts are too complex to be captured by any kind of conceptual formula, for these are always too exclusive and too tyrannical.
It follows that the social sciences are seen to those interested in them not as one discipline in terms of their materials and conclusions, but as a gathering of personal opinions based on documents collected more or less without order and method.
Close to us, however, rises the great monument of the natural sciences. The views of natural scientists on the constitution of man and the world, on the laws of their organisation and development, are no less extensive or less imaginative than those of economists and sociologists on society. But the difference between them is that in the natural sciences speculation and interpretation are secondary and are hardly ever made d priori. Natural scientists are not content simply to declare themselves positivist as a turn of phrase, as most of our popularisers do, and then to act as if positivist methods did not exist and ought not be applied everywhere and always.
The results of the natural sciences are grounded in millions of carefully observed, analysed, and catalogued facts. These facts have subsequently been integrated into sequences and the combination of these sequences has naturally led to the enunciation of laws, partial at first, general later, from which the most powerful and indestructible synthesis that has ever been made now seems possible.
There is no doubt that the methods of natural scientists are admirable. These scholars have made the rigorous application of such methods, invented or improved upon as need arose, the very condition of their work. Ingenious brains have always been found at the right time to invent the new research instruments and demonstration methods needed for the progress of science.
But all of this equipment would have been worth little in terms of its final result if all the natural scientists in all parts of the civilized world, no matter what their
11
12 Paul Otlet
numbers, had not worked toward the completion of the same task, the construction of the same edifice the broad outline of whose design has been impressed upon each one of them. Never has their activity been better co-ordinated. Never has there been less duplication. It seems that at any moment they are always aware of the present status of their science, that they never have to work in vain, discovering without realizing it what was already known. Moreover, each of their discoveries, each new contribution to the advancement of their science, seems to be recorded immediately and to become for everyone the point of departure for future research. Thus does an admirable coherence of work exist among chemists, physicists, and biologists. The latest arrival among this army of investigators can immediately find a useful job to do without having to tarry long with already completed work.
Is our own science, sociology - it is very much ours since Law is its highest expression and implies the whole of it - similar in any of its aspects?
It is rich in facts, even richer in perceptions and observations. The number of those cultivating it is enormous. It is the dominant preoccupation of many people. What does it need, therefore, to achieve the solid, gradual development of the natural sciences? Truly, very little, but that little is essential: more precision and rigour in the observation of facts and more conciseness in the formulation of problems; that is to say, reliable investigation and monitoring procedures and an appropriate method of classifying its materials.
Everything has been said about its methodology. The best minds have in particular shown clearly what the social sciences can expect from modern statistical methods. The reduction of all phenomena to rigorous numerical laws will give them that precision we have pointed out as a first requirement Now, social facts are, par excellence, facts that can be enumerated, since their peculiar character, which differentiates them from facts related to individuals, lies precisely in their frequency and their number. But our intention here is not to attempt yet another exploration of the role of statistics and other sociological methods. Once facts are observed and recorded in publications, thus becoming an integral part of knowledge, we would simply like to find out if with a special classification it is possible eventually and naturally to group them into scientific laws. How can we attain for the social sciences the positive and documentary character of the natural sciences. How can all the efforts of individuals be made to contribute to the development of a definitive synthesis which is built up slowly from facts and is the result not of the speculations of a particular thinker but of the research of all?
What do the sociological sciences deal with, and, from our point of view, how does their object differ from that of the natural sciences? The sociological sciences deal with infinitely numerous and complex social phenomena which are observable in the most distant places on earth, and which require, in order to be understood, a knowledge of anterior facts from the domain of history that are not amenable to direct examination.
The chemist's whole universe is contained in the test tubes of his laboratory. The physicist experiments with natural forces which are the same in Europe, in India,
Something About Bibliography 13
and in Australia. The dogs, pigeons, and rabbits needed for vivisection by physiologists are found in every latitude.
But social facts? They constitute groupings of which both the whole and its parts escape the wisest observer. Where else can one find more connections between phenomena, more reciprocal influences and effects? An appraisal of a social issue is valuable only in proportion to the number of elements which it takes into account. Judgments here are as complex as the matters judged. Any error in the statement of any one of them has immediate consequences for everything that has been deduced from it, thus multiplying the error almost to infinity.
In summary, on the one hand is the absolute necessity if we are to reach an exact statement of the least social law, of taking into account all of the social facts and of being aware of all of their relationships. On the other hand is the impossibility, no less absolute, of any one scholar by himself observing these facts, the greatest number of which have occurred in other times or in the theatre of other places. If this is so, one can appreciate the importance that the best minds are beginning to give to the joint organisation of work, to the division of research in order subsequently to bring together its best results.
Individual monographs, research on matters of detail, contributions to more general studies are multiplying, it is true, out of all proportion. But it is necessary that all of these individual works be registered and classified, so that anyone can retrieve them immediately in order to use them and to push ahead, to know at every moment what has been done and what remains to be done.
How little has been accomplished along these lines!
What could be easier for an explorer than to know precisely and instantly the areas towards which he must direct his investigations if he is to add some new territory to the known and explored world. To determine what the latest discoveries are, all he has to do is to open one of the great maps published by our geographical societies. What remains to be discovered is revealed to him by the latest evidence. Trusting in this guide, he can set out certain of not wasting his energies and resources in expeditions that have already been made and that are, therefore, pointless for the advancement of the science of geography.
Is it not rather similar with industrial discoveries? Each country has a patent office which registers every new invention and publishes a journal, which, day by day, keeps the industrial world abreast of progress. Would it be so difficult to achieve a similar registration of sociological data and concepts?
Our colleague, Charles Dejongh, in the last issue of Palais2 has attempted to set down the outline of a common programme for the study of social questions. He has directed himself to the Conferences du Jeune Barreau throughout Belgium and to similar groups of foreign lawyers. He has asked each of them to select a specific topic in a great synoptic chart he has prepared, and to make an exhaustive study of this topic. All the materials for this would have to be gathered together and conclusions formulated by each section in as many reports as there were subdivisions in the chart.
A superb project, all the more admirable for being at the moment unrealizable! It is not necessary to stress the difficulty of obtaining national and international agreement between associations which are only incidentally concerned with the scientific study of social questions. Moreover, the arrangements for our colleague's project too
14 Paul Otlet
strongly imply that it is a programme that could be completed once and for all in one or two years of work. It seems to us that this is not correct.
Social questions are not of one time, but of all times. At any given period they are no more than the whole of the social requirements of the time . There will always be social questions, as there always have been. Hence, any collective work for their study must have something continuous about it, a flexible, simple, permanent organisation.
For the moment what is important in Charles Dejongh's project is his idea of collective work. More than ever this is the essence of contemporary research. It is important to direct individual efforts towards a single goal and to be careful not to waste anyone's time and energy. Not that it should be necessary to re-create for intellectual undertakings the vast factories industry has required for the production of goods. Here each person, without any regard for his tastes and aptitudes, is given a specific task to do. He patiently works away at one of a thousand nuts and bolts which will be used for an infinitely complex machine that perhaps he never sees complete. Modern scientific research requires too much initiative for such procedures to be appropriate to it. Everyone's freedom must be maintained. But this principle is in no way incompatible with a degree of co-ordination of effort.
Is it possible to achieve this co-ordination, not by imposing rules of work on anyone, but by creating collective works which, while above and beyond individual projects, use them, complete them, make their development easier? This is the question in a nutshell.
Let us examine the services which, in this context, bibliography could provide if it were more comprehensive.
With some quite rare exceptions, bibliography until now has been restricted to the modest function of indicating sources. In the beginning it was the preoccupation of the bibliophile and the speculative ventures of the book trade. Subsequently, with the publication of the catalogues of our great public libraries, it became more scientific. It was easy to arrange books alphabetically by the names of authors. A few large subject divisions were also created but these were no more than literature, law, history, etc. Gradually, for their own use, librarians constructed catalogues intended to respond to readers' requests for information. The principle of arrangement of such catalogues was naturally classification by subject. It was necessary to know how to indicate immediately what works their library had on alcoholism, taxes, the history of the French Revolution, etc. Then authors began to adopt the habit of referring whenever they could to the sources they had used. Scholars also imitated the example of librarians. They created their own small bibliographical listings in which were recorded not only the resources of their own libraries but, culled from their reading, any bibliographical or other information which might be useful to them some day. They alsoT>egan to refer to the collectors of detailed index cards, those who, because of their carefully arranged systems of drawers and pigeon-holes, in two hours could furnish material for a scholarly lecture on any subject with which they were familiar. Anyone with research to do went and knocked on their door, certain of coming away with hands full of references. Enormous trouble was thus avoided. Referral to the latest study to have appeared on a
Something About Bibliography 15
subject did away with the need for ploughing through mountains of books and journals as a means of being brought up to date on it.
One came so far. One hardly went further. Indeed, sociology has not drawn from Bibliography all the advantages that the latter can offer. Here is a marvellous instrument of progress which is still very primitive but whose first results augur well for its future.
A first step towards collective work would be to approach systematically the classification of sources. What has already been written and thought provides, par excellence, the basic materials of the social sciences. It is, therefore, quite natural at the outset to make a systematic inventory of these sources - both historical and contemporary, a catalogue of books, brochures, and articles in journals and encyclopedias, arranged alphabetically by authors' names and systematically by subjects. This would be a catalogue whose publication could begin at once. It would fall into two series, the one retrospective, the other by means of periodical issues listing, month by month, all new publications. At the moment such a work has not yet been specifically undertaken for the benefit of the social sciences, though one can cite examples for the other disciplines. The Index Medicus [l] published in the United States, is a true catalogue of medical literature. Caspars Directory of the American Book, news and stationery Trade, wholesale and retail [2] has achieved on a large scale for all of the branches of American learning what the Bulletin des sommaires4 has undertaken on a more modest scale for France. Finally, in Germany, the Allegmeine Bibliographie [3] of Putkammer and Muhlbrecht and the Sommaire piriodique des revues de droit[4] are periodical listings of legal books and periodicals.
Such catalogues of sources, however, would not be adequate for sociology. In fact, of what value are all these sources? What does the title of a book and the name of its author conceal? It is just as important to be familiar with a work as to know of its existence. Nowadays, every new work is sent for review to the editors of newspapers and journals. Special publication exist, such as Polybiblion [5], devoted exclusively to book reviewing. The discipline of law alone has Themis5 in Holland, the Centralblattfur Rechtswissenschaft [6] and the Vierteljahresschrift fur Gesetzegebung und Rechtswissenschaft [7] in Germany, and the Rivista internazionale per le scienze giuridiche in Italy. This is enough to indicate the position, greater every day, that bibliography now assumes. There is in general, however, not much system to producing book reviews, and this is a hindrance. Fine phrases, uncritical praise and some scraps of ideas copied from chance openings of the book are often all that can be found in them.
[1] Index Medicus, a monthly classified record of the Current Medical Literature of the World. Compiled
under the supervision of Dr. John S. Billings and Dr. Robert Fletcher, Boston, George S. Davis, Publisher. [2] Caspars directory of the American Book, news and stationery Trade, wholesale and retail, by C.N. Caspar,
Milwaukee, Wis., bookseller. New York, office of "the publishers' weekly". * [3] Allgemeine Bibliographie der Stoats und Rechtswissenschaften, Uebersicht der auf diesen Gebieten im
deutschen und auslandischen Buchhandelnen erschienen Literatur. Jahrlich 6 Doppelnummerr. [4] Sommaire piriodique des revues de droit. Table mensuelle de tous les articles et etudes juridiques publics
dans les periodiques beiges et etrangers. Bruxelles, Vve Larcier. [5] Polybiblion. revue bibliographique universelle. L Partie liueraire. II. Partie technique. Paris, 5, rue St.
Simon. [6] Centralblattfur Rechtswissenschaft herausgegeben von Dr von Kirchenheim. Berlin, Guttentag. [7] Kritische Vierteljaresschrift fur Gesetzegebung und Rechtswissenschaft Herausg. von Bechman und
Seydel. Miinchen, von Oldenburg.
16 Paul Otlet
Breaking with tradition, the editor of the interesting Rivista per la scienze giuridiche [8], Mr. E. Serafini, has resolved to have authors describe their books themselves. In a very few pages, two or three at most, they briefly present their findings and what it is in their work that merits attention. An essential point - the reviews are signed. It is to be hoped that empty phrases and flattery will henceforth appear grotesque and misplaced and will become rare.
Pushing on further with these ideas, cannot one imagine a book review which has been developed "scientifically" according to standardised procedures? It has been observed that the excellent idea adopted for legal digests of making a very short resume of the contents of judicial decisions, at one time gave rise to grave abuses. Under the pretext of summarising a judgement in a few sentences, the annotators used the abstract to express their own opinions. Certain lawyers recognized this evil, denounced it and established systematic rules for the preparation of the abstracts. Since then, for most cases, one can dispense with reading all of a decision. Everyone's research has thus been reduced.
Nothing prevents the application of the rules for the preparation of an abstract to that of a review. While in the legal decision it is the principle that has been established which must be set forth, for the book it is the point of view or objective of the author along with his general conclusions, and these are nearly always indicated in the preface or the last chapter. The need for objectivity is the same in both cases. If textual extracts are important in the composition of abstracts, they will be even more so for reviews. All that is necessary is that, in the course of a careful reading, appropriate passages be intelligently underlined. These can be extracted later, so that, after a fashion, the authors are allowed to speak for themselves.
The Societi des sciences societies et politiqu.es of Brussels, whose bibliographical section, directed by our colleague La Fontaine, is becoming ever more important, believed that it was possible to ask its members to collaborate in the preparation of bibliographical cards. Each person who asked to be associated with this work was given cards of the same format. The title of the book or of the periodical article, the name of the author, that of the publisher, the price, the year, the number of pages and a short summary were then to be added to the card. It soon became necessary to put a stop to this. Some limited themselves to transcribing the title using different words. Others prepared what were really critical articles and extended themselves immoderately. Good extracts, prepared according to the procedure outlined here - a procedure which would permit a copyist to undertake the greatest part of the task - would avoid these difficulties.
Indexes for books, brochures and articles, and objective reviews of everything that is published, are just one part of the programme that should be undertaken for the bibliography of the social sciences. As a matter of fact from the purely formal point of view one can break it down into the following elements: facts, interpretation of facts, statistics, sources. All of its materials are reducible to these four terms. The materials can then be brought together and re-arranged in particular categories which are no more than the various questions the discipline poses, answers to which are sought from the
[8] Rivista Internationale per le scienze giuridiche. Directeur, M.E. Serafini, professor at the University of Mace rata.
Something About Bibliography 17
materials. All of these questions taken together, with their subdivisions and the answers provided for them, constitute the discipline.
The various parts of any book, periodical article, or lecture can be easily reduced to the different elements we have mentioned above. For written works a re- arrangement of their contents not along the lines of the special plan of a particular book, but according to the genus and species appropriate to each element does not make for any loss of substance.
This systematic recording of facts, statistical data and interpretations of them in the final analysis will be work undertaken by only a few individuals: the creation of a kind of artificial brain by means of cards containing actual information or simply notes of references.
Such an undertaking is indubitably useful, for Knowledge merely comprises all observed facts and of all the likely hypotheses that have been formulated to explain these facts and reduce them to laws. The external make-up of a book, its format and the personality of its author are unimportant provided that its substance, its sources of information and its conclusions are preserved and can be made an integral part of the organisation of knowledge, an impersonal work created by the efforts of all. The ideal, from this point of view, would be to strip each article or each chapter in a book of whatever is a matter of fine language or repetition or padding and to collect separately on cards whatever is new and adds to knowledge. These cards, minutely subdivided, each one annotated as to the genus and species of the information they contain, because they are separate could then be accurately placed in a general alphabetical catalogue updated each day. One such winnowing to conserve the best grain is clearly only an ideal. What is possible in practice?
Much more than is generally believed. Let us instance, for example, the great encyclopedias whose publication is continued by quinquennial supplements or even bi- monthly supplements, as in the interesting case of the Revue encycloptdique6 which is the continuation of the great Encyclopidie Larousse.1
Let us note also as support for what collective undertakings can do to help individual research through good subject classification, the great law collections and the excellent system of monthly, annual and quinquennial supplements which legal digests publish in order to bring some order to accumulating material.
Finally, closer to our topic, both because of the actual nature of the subjects and the periodical nature of the publication of the material, are the great journals which have occasionally in themselves founded a whole discipline. Who can say, for example, what is the role of the Journal du droit international prive% in the development of this aspect of law? The Archives de I'anthropologie criminelle of Lacassagne contains the elements of a complete encyclopedia on this subject9; and there is no important philosophical matter of the last twenty years, which has not been mentioned in Ribot's review.10 The tables of contents of such periodicals provide the best catalogues of sources which are available today.
The programme we are proposing for sociology is, therefore, not unrealisable d priori. Without going into too many details, let us indicate some ways of helping to carry it out
Unlike dictionaries, for which an alphabetical arrangement is still adopted, the general catalogue of the social sciences of which we are speaking will be prepared on
18 Paul Otlet
separate cards, thus allowing for all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling. This system is the only one which can be reconciled with the necessities of collective bibliographic work as we conceive it, because it alone permits the formation of the catalogue from contributions coming in from everywhere.
Indeed, we think that the cards of the catalogue should not derive from a single publication, but on the contrary, from all publications, each one according to what it has offer in its speciality. One would not subscribe to the repertory, but in every library or study it would be created from elements supplied ad hoc by just about everybody.
Because of the existence of this repertory, the typographical layout of the text of bibliographical journals would be arranged in such a way that they could be easily cut up for filing with cards on the same subjects. The format of the paper would be standard and only the recto would be printed on.
The tables of contents of scientific books are becoming more and more systematic and complete. When a work is large and when it has a general title, its table of contents is the best indicator of what it contains. In order to make up the great catalogues of sources of which we are speaking, it will be necessary to record these tables of contents on as many cards as there are chapters. This new use will in its turn bring about important typographical changes. Publishers will have the tables of contents printed separately for use in catalogues and editors of journals will follow their example. To follow up the resolutions taken at the last Congress of the Book11, new national and international meetings will have to formulate general rules. Agreement will be reached on the essential elements for all tables of contents, the basis of Bibliography, just as other congresses have regulated the units of measurement and nomenclature of other sciences.
The great public libraries are the primary group interested in the catalogue of sources. Their cataloguing departments should assume a special task, which will differ according to country, and undertake to publish a certain number of cards, as M. Nizet has proposed in a recent brochure.12 Finally, individuals and scientific societies must become more active as collaborators in this collective work.
The goal is to create in each country an association, or a section of an existing association, whose programme is the collection, verification and publication on cards of information today remaining unused in the bottom of boxes. These cards would rapidly enlarge the size of the catalogue.
In the April 27 issue of Flandre judiciaire Me. H. de Baets, our eminent colleague at Gand, has presented a model of an easy-to-prepare "reading note" which could be used to give a preliminary idea of the arrangements which we are proposing. 13
What remains to be discussed is the status of a subject or how easily to ascertain the point of development reached by any branch of knowledge. The famous Swnma of Saint Thomas14 should be mentioned here as an example. It sets^ forth a complete exposition of all the questions which the philosophers of the Middle Ages posed and formulates an answer for each question according to the state of knowledge then. Summae are no longer possible. The a priori is too far in the past and the empirical method has not yet produced enough facts for us to attempt today a new and definitive synthesis.
Something About Bibliography 19
Should we limit ourselves to the subject reports proposed by our colleague Dejongh? Really, we would have to begin again every six months. Moreover, it is not possible to make them an integral and daily part of the repertory that we have described. After all, the reasonable goal proposed here is that any one person should be able rapidly to find out, not all about a subject, but all about the branches into which it has been divided and about the work already done relative to these branches. What must be avoided are repetition and duplication because of ignorance of previous work.
We believe that a very systematic and very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge would have enormous advantages. It would briefly mention all the aspects of a science, either in the form of a set of questions or according to a careful arrangement of its nomenclature. The latter form would be better because of its conciseness and the influence that it would have on the creation of a scientific language ne varietur of which the Social Sciences are particularly in need. This nomenclature, which usage would soon shape and stabilise, could also be used for the classification of cards in the catalogue. It would thus permit the creation of very practical links between the catalogue and the Synoptic outline.
We will borrow a model from law, whose centuries-old language has nearly achieved the precision of the language of chemistry. A word in law not only evokes the object named in its concrete form, but also, by logical association, all the characteristics and attributes of the object in the same way that the formula for a compound expresses its relationships and quickly makes its elements evident. The classification of legal subjects has also achieved an extraordinary precision. We would like to offer as proof, along with the indexes of certain catalogues, the preparation of the arguments which precede the entries for decrees and judgments in legal digests. A gradation of five or six words can move from the more general, to the less general, to a particular fact. Each card of the catalogue that we are proposing also would have its own argument, the basis of its classification, and the terms of the argument would be the same as those of the synoptic outline.
The ideas which we have developed in the preceding pages in support of an organisation for a general bibliography of the social sciences have found a practical application in what has been recently attempted for mathematics. In 1889, the French Mathematical Society took the initiative in calling a congress to establish the basis for an international bibliography of mathematics.15
M. Maurice d'Ocagne [9], explained what it was hoped would be achieved, in these terms:
"The number of workers, and, as a necessary consequence, the number of publications needed to make known the fruits of their research, have grown considerably. Mathematical writings are increasing everywhere. Clearly, they are not all of the same degree of interest for the progress ofthe discipline; however, it is possible to find in the most modest of them the germ of some fruitful idea which ought not to be overlooked. Now, it is physically impossible, even for the largest and most gifted intelligence, to embrace such a quantity of matter. Hence, the necessity for an appropriate guide which will allow a searcher to find out rapidly what has been achieved here and now on a
[9] Revue generate des sciences, 20 mars 1 89 1 , p. 170. M
20 Paul Otlet
particular point, and which will provide him with complete bibliographical references to this effect
The congress was held in Paris on the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th of July 1889, was presided over by M. Poincare,17 and took, among others, the following resolutions:
1. A bibliographical catalogue of mathematics whose purpose is to spare workers long and difficult searches should be published. This catalogue should contain the titles of papers on pure and applied mathematics published since 1800 up to 1889 inclusively, as well as works relative to the history of mathematics since loOO up to 1889. Entries should be arranged not by author's names, but according to a logical subject order.
2. Every ten years a ten-year supplement will be published.
5. The Congress adopts the following classification for the Catalogue: The various headings will be arranged in a certain number of classes, subdivided into sub-classes, divisions, sections, ana sub-sections. The classes will be designated by a capital letter assigned an exponent. The classes or sub-classes will be sub-divided into divisions designated by an Arabic numeral, the divisions into sections designated by a lower-case Roman letter and these can also be sub-divided into sub-sections indicated by a lower- case Greek letter. Thus, the sub-section of section b, which is part of the division 3 of sub-class L' would be written in this way in a rectangular frame:
L*3 b a.
8. The Congress resolves that the various periodicals devoted to mathematics should publish for their volumes a general table of contents that follows the classification adopted above. The Congress will be very grateful to the editors of these journals if they would assist the permanent commission as much as possible in the matter of this classification.
9. In order to facilitate the establishment of supplements devoted to works after 1889, the Congress resolves that each author should include after the title of his paper the notation defined in the 5th resolution; and that, if the author has neglected to do this, the editors of the various periodicals, or in their default, the editors of indexing services which analyze these works, should assume responsibility for it
Following these resolutions, the Congress appointed a permanent international commission to carry out its decisions. This commission is connected with the Committee on Historical and Scientific Work of the Ministry for Public Instruction which has provided the financial support needed to produce the much hoped-for bibliography. Today, it is in the process of being carried out 18
Let us add that the Royal Society of London intends to bring together for each individual science and according to a systematic subject arrangement the references listed in alphabetical order by author's name in the eight volumes of its Catalogue of Scienttfic Papers (1800 to 1863 and 1863 to 1874).J9
Such are a few of the ideas that come to mind when, after some investigation, we ponder what Bibliography and collective endeavour could achieved advancing the social sciences.
Something About Bibliography 21
Editor's Notes
1. "Un peu de bibliographic" appeared in Palais, organe des Conferences du Jeune Barreau de Belgique, in the volume for 1891-1892, pp. 254-271. Otlet is describes as "Avocat a la Cour d'appel de Bruxelles (Councillor or Barrister in the Appellate Court of Brussels). The setting out of the text of this article has been slightly condensed by the editor. Les Conferences du Jeune Barreau de Belgique was a forum in which junior barristers practiced pleading and discussed legal and other questions of interest. There were sections in the major Belgian cities.
2. Charles de Jongh (1854-1932), an acquaintance of Otlet's, a brilliant barrister, later President of the Belgium Bar, was active in the foundation in 1894 of the Nouvelle University de Bruxelles. In 1919 he became president of the Belgian legislative Council. The paper Otlet refers to was, "Le Jeune Barreau et les questions sociales" Palais, 1891-1892, pp. 125-130. The article was followed by a "Tableau pour servir a l'etude methodique des questions sociales (Outline for use in the systematic study of sociological subjects)," pp. 131-137.
3. Caspars Directory is a most curious work. Its subtitle describes it as "comprising the Publishing, Subscription, Retail Book, Antiquarian, News, Map, Art, Music, Manufacturing, Jobbing and Retail Stationery, Blank Book and Paper Manufacturing Business, and General Jobbers in above lines; in the United States and Canada." To the name, name changes, partial address and so on of each firm listed is added an indication of "appropriate financial standing ... based on the latest commercial reports." Caspar notes which publishers issue trade lists or catalogues and whether these are reproduced in The Publishers Trade List Annual. Part VI, "Theory and Practice of the Book Trade and Kindred Branches" has a section of 20 pages of bibliographical publications subdivided by countries: America, British Empire (excluding Canada), German Empire, France, other Countries (Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Norway, Russia and Poland, Scandinavia, Sweden, Spain and Portugal). There is a vocabulary of English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Latin (and some other language) terms, phrases, and abbreviations used in the trade (including musical terms). It is not clear why Otlet should cite this work or compare it with Limousin's indexing journal. The 1885 edition of Caspar's Directory contained less than 300 pages; the edition of 1889, no doubt that to which Otlet refers, contained more than 1300 pages.
4. Bulletin des sommaires. Revue ... de la presse scientifique, politique, littiraire, artistique et financiire. This, which appeared with various changes of title and frequency from 1888 to 1903, was edited by CM. Limousin. It indexed for "the curious intellectual" a large number of newspapers and about 140 journals. Each issue of the index was prefaced by a "causerie" or "chat" that gave a very personal tone to the whole enterprise. Entries were arranged under broad general headings with a multitude of specific sub-headings. In 1896 Limousin, having been an interested participant in the 1895 International Conference on Bibliography in Brussels, introduced the use of the Decimal Classification to organise and index entries. In one of his "chats" he explains his joy in the system, then the difficulties
22 Paul Otlet
of applying it and what needed to be done in a case like his ("Causerie - Preface: la Classification Scientifique," Bulletin des sommaires 8 (10 January 1896): 1).
5. Themis; verzameling van bijdragen tot de kennis van net publiek en privaatrecht The Hague, vols. 1-99, 1839-1938. This amalgamated in 1939 with Rechtsgeleerd magazijn to form Rechtsgeleerd Magazin Themis.
6. Revue encyclopidique: recueil documentaire universel et illustre" public sous la Direction de M. Georges Moreau (Paris: Librairie Larousse). This was published from 1891 to 1900. The preface describes the Revue as founded on the basis of the Grand Dictionnaire universel de P. Larousse and was intended "To follow the contemporary scene step by step, to record, as it proceeds, all the facts worthy of being pointed out, and to collect, analyze and classify all the literature which could at any moment become the subject of research. " It was illustrated and divided into three sections dealing with literature and fine arts, the moral and political sciences, and the pure and applied sciences. It had a separate Index-Journal, a combined index to the Revue and "dictionary" of current events with short articles on dates, events and happenings sufficient for brief reference for readers not needing to turn to the main work itself. It also contained a section of information related to the news of the day drawn from and referring to other sources so that it could serve as a kind of "newspapers'" newspaper. It became Revue universelle: recueil documentaire universel et illustre, 1901-1905.
7. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siicle, francais, historique, geographique, mythologique, bibliographique, litteraire, artistique, scientifique, etc., par M. Pierre Larousse. (Paris; Larousse et Boyer, 1866-1890). 17 vols.
8. Journal du droit international privi was published in Paris, in 41 volumes from 1874 to 1914. It became the Journal du droit international which is still issued.
9. Archives d'anthropologie criminelle, de medecine legale et de psychologie normal et pathologique was published in 29 volumes from 1886 to 1914. From 1886 to 1892 it was known as Archives de Vanthropologie criminelle et des sciences pennies . Alexandre Lacassagne (1843-1924), a French physician, was from 1880 Professor of Legal Medicine in the University of Lyon. He wrote several textbooks which went through a number of editions, other monographs, and numerous articles for the Archives de Vanthropologie criminelle and for the Dictionnaire encyclopidique des sciences midicales.
10. Revue philosophique de la France et de I'itranger paraissant tous les mois (Paris, Alcan). This was begun in 1876 and is still published, nowadays by Les Presses Universitaires de France. Theodule-Armand Ribot (1838-1916) was a psychologist who, attempting to introduce positivist ideas into psychology, stressed the need for observation and experimentation and the removal of the speculations of philosophy from the subject. Several of his works went through a number of editions and were translated into numerous languages.
11. Otlet probably refers here to the Conference internationale du Livre held at Antwerp in August 1890 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the death of Plantin. Nearly
Something About Bibliography 23
200 person attended and questions such as format of books, their composition and conservation, the creation of national bibliographies, together with technical matters concerning booksellers, publishers and authors were discussed.
12. F. NizeL Notice sur les catalogues de bibliothequ.es publiques (Bruxelles: Imprimerie Vanbuggenhouht, 1887). This work went through three editions during 1887-1888. Francois-Joseph Nizet (1829-1899), Doctor of Law, Political and Social Sciences, and Philosophy and Letters, became a keeper in the Belgian Royal Library where he was in charge of the preparation of the library's alphabetic subject catalogue, problems of compilation and organisation of which his pamphlet described. It contains an interesting discussion of subject headings.
13. "Notes de lecture" Flandre judiciare 40 (27 April 1892); 350-351. This article, which is unsigned (H. de Baets was co-editor of the journal), sets out an approach to recording systematically on a "reading card" notes drawn from works about legal cases. "By indicating classification terms and legislative dispositions, one prepares for the work of future editors of alphabetic catalogues or annotated codes. If this practice became more general, the collaboration of all in forming digests would be achieved....". The article gives the "fiche" with these details for a work she has just read and "begs our readers to send us similar cards which it is quite easy to make in studying any subject".
14. St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica is a compendium of brief, systematic statements of the main beliefs of Christian doctrine. It was the greatest of a number of medieval summae (syntheses or summations of knowledge) and was written between 1267-1273. It was organised in three parts (theology, God etc; human race, morality, mysticism and miracles etc; the Incarnate World, Christ, etc), all three being divided into "questions" and then "articles" in answer.
15. The congress was called Congres international de bibliographic des sciences mathSmatiques.
16. Otlet refers here to Philibert-Maurice d'Ocagne (1862-1938), a distinguished mathematician and graduate of the famous Ecole Polytechnique. One of the originators of the scheme, he was secretary of the Commission for the Bibliography of Mathematics for a number of years.
17. Jules-Henri Poincare' (1854-1912) was also a graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique. He was attached to the Ministry of Public Works. His most distinguished professional work was as a teacher in the Ecole Polytechnique and as a professor in the Faculty of Sciences in Paris. He was elected to the Academie des Sciences in 1887 and his important contribution won several prizes in the Academie and internationally.
18. The organisational details, the conference resolutions and the classification are given in Index du Ripertoire bibliographique des sciences mathimatiques publi6 par la Commission permanente du Repertoire (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et fils, 1893). The article by d'Ocagne in the Revue ginirale des sciences pures et appliquies mentioned in Otlet's footnote is by way of being a progress report on overcoming
24 Paul Otlet
organisational and financial difficulties. The Repertoire bibliographique des sciences mathimatiques appeared between 1894 and 1912 in the form of twenty series or batches of cards. Each batch contained 100 cards. Each card was slightly larger than the now standard 3" x 5" card and each was headed by a classification number in a black box as described in the conference resolution quoted by Otlet The cards were arranged so that the longer side was vertical and each contained up to, though usually less than, 10 entries. The entries are models of the use of different type weights and faces to indicate the bibliographic structure of entries. Presumably the cards were interfiled as each batch arrived or each batch or series was bound as a small volume as was the case for the copy at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. The edition of the Index du Repertoire bibliographique des sciences mathimatiques published in 1898 contained a list of the full titles of the journals indexed. The abbreviations used for these in the entries on the cards are uninterpretable by and large without reference to the Index. The first edition (also translated into Dutch) contained only introductory matter and the schedules of classification. A new edition of the Index appeared in 1908.
19. The first series of the Catalogue of Scientific Papers covered the period 1800 to 1863 in six volumes; a second series in two volumes covered the period 1864 to 1873; and a third series covering the period 1874 to 1883 was issued between 1891 and 1896. The catalogue for the whole of the nineteenth century was not completed until 1925. The problem of providing appropriate subject access to it was discussed continually from the beginning but was never satisfactorily solved. Certainly nothing came of the initiatives Otlet refers to though an incomplete subject index (3 volumes in 4), classified by the schedules adopted for the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature was eventually issued in 1908-1914 (See W. Boyd Rayward, "The Search for Subject Access to The Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900")
2. CREATION OF A UNIVERSAL BIBLIOGRAPHIC REPERTORY: A PRELIMINARY NOTE1
Qui scil ubi scieniia habenti est proximo
The subject of bibliography is on the agenda of a great many scientific congresses. This year it has been included in the programmes of the International Geographic Congress of London2, the French Association for the Advancement of Science3, and the International Artistic and Literary Association4. The Royal Society of London was concerned with it last year5. Quite recently, it was discussed at the Royal Academy of Belgium.6
There is unanimous agreement on the usefulness and necessity of a universal bibliographic repertory. But as far as ways and means go, its practical organisation, few details have been provided up till now. Six years ago an examination of these questions was begun in Brussels by a group on whose initiative the International Office of Bibliography was founded. Their studies were experimental. The International Office of Bibliography, placed under the patronage of the Belgium government, has thus far classified 400,000 bibliographic notices dealing with the major areas of scholarship, most particularly law, statistics, political economy, philology and literature. It possesses techniques of demonstrated excellence.
The purpose of this note is to make known how this office is organised and functions and to show how the extension and generalization of its services would provide the best solution to the problem of a Universal Bibliographic Repertory.
In order to respond to all the requirements that have been identified, a Universal Bibliographic Repertory should meet the following conditions:
1. It should be complete. It should contain both the bibliography of the past and the present. It should also be able to keep up with future production. Its object should be the whole of human knowledge. Moreover, periodical articles, and the studies contained in the proceedings of academies, societies and congresses should be represented in it in the same way as books and brochures.
2. The Repertory should be both by name and subject, that is to say, it should be able to provide information rapidly and easily about the works of an author whose name is known, and about works which are on a particular subject by authors who are as yet unknown. The repertory should, therefore, be both alphabetic by authors' names and classified by subjects. It is necessary that related matters should be grouped so that the searchers can avoid the too numerous searches which result from the scattering of subjects.
25
26 Paul Otlet
3. The Bibliographic Repertory should exist in multiple copies. It is an instrument of study and research of which no intellectual centre should be deprived. Therefore it should not be too costly or its upkeep too complicated. It should also be possible to divide it up because various of its parts will have no interest for a great many people.
4. The Repertory should be both correct and concise, both in the information which it provides and in the way it classifies this information. Errors and omissions are inherent in all human works. They are inevitable in a work as considerable as a Universal Bibliographic Repertory. Any system that is adopted should permit the easy correction of errors and omissions without the general repertory being affected.
5. The Repertory should be made available promptly to researchers who have been calling for it for a number of years. This immediate realisation is only possible if the repertory is able to use most of the bibliographic works that presently exist, and if it can be made available in parts before being entirely completed.
6. The Repertory should also include a listing of locations. A great many books no longer exist other than in rare copies in a few fortunate libraries. It is important that a general compilation of the catalogues of individual libraries should be able promptly to inform any one who is doing special research where to go.
7. The Repertory should also become the basis for Intellectual Statistics. These statistics, begun no more than a few years ago, are of limited scope because of the lack of a precise and complete census. They bear on the number of books, the nationality of their authors, and their subjects.
8. Finally, the Repertory should eventually be able to be used to ensure that authors get better legal protection for their intellectual works.
The experiments of the International Office of Bibliography have led to some rules that have enabled it to begin a Repertory which will meet satisfactorily all of these requirements.
This Repertory is indeed universal. Its entries deal with the whole of human knowledge and include articles from periodicals, contributions to the great compendia, and books and brochures. Entries are prepared in duplicate on separate cards. The first card is placed in an alphabetical repertory of authors' names, the second in a classified repertory. The cards in the classified repertory are arranged according to the Decimal Classification, adopted by the American Association of Librarians. This classification has three advantages. First, it provides for human knowledge a nomenclature which is stable and universal and can be expressed in an international language - that of numbers. It allows a standardised methodology to be used in classifying all bibliographies and preserves an exact agreement between classification in libraries and that of the bibliographic repertory. Finally, it provides an indefinite system of subject division and sub-division so that everything that is related is grouped together.
The Office of Bibliography is divided into sections which correspond to each of the branches of Knowledge and which are the responsibility of specialists. A central
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 27
section has the special duty of collecting and making a first check of materials to be indexed. Each of the sections annotates and then classifies the cards which concern it. The Repertory comprises old and new sources. Because of its system of cards and continuous intercalation a complete listing of intellectual production can be achieved. Current material is published periodically in special Bibliographical Indexes whose arrangement is identical to that of the repertory. Finally, in order to make the whole repertory - of past publications and current publications - available to researchers of all countries, the International Office foresees its continuous publication on separate cards which will be sent, completely annotated and classified, to local offices annexed to major libraries or universities.
Such is, in broad outline, the organisation of the repertory begun by the Office of Bibliography. We must now describe each of its elements in detail.
The services to be expected from Bibliography are many. It should provide information for scholars, practical men, librarians, book-sellers, and the great reading public.
From the essentially scholarly point of view, a complete bibliography should constitute, at each moment, an encyclopedic table of contents of the subject matter of knowledge. What scholars quite reasonably wish to do is to pass from the known to the unknown, to make use of the work of all who have preceded them as they push scientific investigation further forward, avoiding unwitting repetition and loss of precious time. Especially today, scientific work has become specialized and international. Science progresses through the efforts of scholars from every country, with every kind of skill. Each brings to the common edifice the stone he himself has quarried. It is important, however, that this stone be trimmed to the dimensions of the place in which it must fit beside the others, and consequently that the state of development of the whole of the work should always be exactly and easily known.
Practical men have a similar need. For them it is a matter of easily finding out about a fact, a law, an invention of which they wish to make use. Technical dictionaries are inadequate for they are too soon outdated. As for the periodicals which are tending to replace them, they have become so many that it is no longer possible to use old procedures in consulting them. A universal bibliographic organisation will allow us to regard all that has been published regardless of place, time or form of printing as elements in an immense, theoretical, historical and practical encyclopedia for which the Repertory will become the table of contents.
Librarians, in their turn, clamour for the organisation of bibliography. Only the great libraries are able to afford the luxury of a complete cataloguing service. However, without a catalogue the library is a closed coffer, full of precious things that are invisible and inaccessible for want of a key. A Universal Bibliographic Repertory will do away with the need for individual catalogues which are of necessity incomplete. It will replace them by a single, always current catalogue, which will give readers information not only about the contents of the library they are working in, but about everything that is available beyond it in other libraries or commercially through the booktrade. Today, in thousands of libraries, men are working laboriously to list and classify the same books.
28 Paul Otlet
Each time a new collection is formed this work must be done again. Moreover, there are as many methods as individuals. Classification differs from country to country, from town to town, from library to library, requiring a new approach by the searcher to each new catalogue he consults. The Bibliographic Repertory, reproduced in many copies, will bring about standardisation of classification which is so much desired.
By means of division of work, a new body which is distinct from all the others will henceforth be especially entrusted with the classification of written documents. The classification must be developed by specialists and not, any more, by those of whom universal knowledge is demanded and to whom it is gratuitously attributed. Libraries will have a double benefit from this. They will be almost totally absolved from providing an extremely costly service. Henceforward they ought to be able to offer help directly in the research of the public who come to them, for they will be able to reply immediately to the question which is invariably put to them: "what works exist on such and such a subject?" The catalogues that each library prints at great expense, and which new accessions soon make out of date, can be replaced by the Repertory. Each library will note in the margin of the cards of the Repertory the works which it possesses and their shelf mark. The cards on which no such note appears will suggest the books which could be acquired for each subject
Publishers, booksellers and authors themselves have everything to gain from the effective organisation of bibliography. The book trade needs above all accurate and rapidly and easily obtained information. The anarchic state of libraries today has its parallel in the book trade. Publishers' catalogues, apart form some happy exceptions, are prepared without order or method. Their compilation is guided by no shared understanding. Thus, they barely succeed in being useful to the readers for whom they are made, and the enormous sums spent in publicity each year for new works are less effective than need be. Supply and demand exist, of course, but independently of each other; they do not connect; publisher's announcements do not reach those who seek them. A Universal Bibliographic Repertory would assure publishers of prompt, serious, permanent and really effective advertising. To authors who, after all, write to be read, it will give assurance of reaching those whom they really wish to reach.
Librarians, scientists and practical men, authors and publishers, the great mass of ordinary readers, all have the greatest interest in the development of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory. Governments, themselves, cannot remain indifferent to it. Cannot they who, at great cost, manage museums and collections of every kind, encourage this collection which is more valuable than any: the inventory of what men have thought and written since they learned how to write?
Happily - and too often one forgets it - not everything remains to be done in bibliography. Already there lies behind it a long history which simply consists of successive attempts to achieve a better organisation of the world of books.
The humanists of the 15th Century who carefully collected the remains of classical antiquity, were bibliographers in their way. Their glosses and annotations were used as indexes by the men of their time. In 1686, Teissier was already able to compile a catalogue of catalogues.7 Francesco Marucelli (1625-1703), in the 15 (sic) manuscript
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 29
volumes of his Mare magnum, strove to make an inventory of the extant writings of his day.8 He had numerous imitators: Fabiano Giustiniani,9 Georg Draud of Frankfurt,10 Savonarola,11 the author of the Or bis literarius, a universal index in 40 manuscript volumes of all the existing printed works up to the end of the year 1700. Special bibliographies also made their appearance at that time. Martin Lipenius's Bibliotheca realis juridica (1679) was followed in the same year by Bibliotneca realis medica, then came his Bibliotneca realis philosophica in 1682, and the Bibliotneca realis theologica in 1685. 12
With the 18th Century began the era of the great encyclopedias in which a bibliography of the subject was placed at the end of each article. This is also the period in which the first attempts at periodical indexing were made. In 1790, B cutler published in Germany the Allgemeines Sachregister uber die Wichtigsten deutschen Zeit-und Wochenschriften.M In England at about the same time, Ayscough published his General Index to the Monthly Review, the second volume of which appeared in 1786. It contained An Alphabetical Index to all the memorable Passages, many of which relate to Discoveries and Improvements in the Sciences and Arts for near forty years past; With Literary Anecdotes, Critical Remarks, etc., etc., contained in the Monthly Review during that period. The part of this gigantic work which appeared in 1796 comprised: A General Index to the Remarkable Passages, and to the Papers contained in the Transactions or Memoirs of Societies, Foreign and Domestic, occurring in the Review during that Period.14
With the 19th Century, bibliography became to some extent official. Some of the great States considered that it was their duty to register the literary production of their nations. The development of the great public libraries and the proclamation of the exclusive right of authors to the exploitation of their works, contributed almost everywhere to the publication of periodical bibliographies of which the Bibliographie de la France was one of the earliest models.15 These official bibliographies quickly duplicated the catalogues published from time to time by booksellers' associations. The general nature and poor arrangement of these publications soon gave birth to attempts at special quarterly or annual periodical bibliographies which indexed all the information related to a particular branch of knowledge, such as the Bibliotheca philologica, the Bibliographia orientalis, the Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Medicin, etc.16
The greatest bibliographical effort of the 19th Century, however, has been made by the Americans. Voluntary co-operation of librarians on the one hand and of booksellers on the other, has given birth to a series of admirable works to which are attached the names of Poole, Fletcher, Cutter, Dewey, Windsor, and many others. In 1850 in the United States, a new country without a history, there were about 100 libraries containing 5,000 volumes or more. The whole of their collections were judged to be 1 million volumes. In 1890, forty years later, four thousand libraries contained 27 million books. The question of catalogues, as we know, has gained attention in a quite special way. In 1848, Frederick Poole began to issue an Index to Subjects Treated in Reviews and other Periodicals which contained about 28,000 bibliographical entries. The American Library Association (ALA) was founded at Philadelphia in 1876 and in the following year reached an agreement with the Library Association of the United Kingdom in England to develop the Co-operative Index to Periodical Literature, to index and classify articles in English language periodicals from 1802. The first volume, in 8°
30 Paul Ot let
with XXVII - 1442 pages, a listing of 200,000 articles in the 6,205 volumes of 232 periodicals, appeared in 1882. Fifty collaborators associated with libraries in the United States, England, Scotland, and Australia, had cooperated. The Americans did not stop at this point Successive supplements to the Co-operative Index have been prepared.17 In 1886 a special section of the Association of Librarians was created for printing bibliographies.18 A journal, the Library Journal, has been specially devoted to the study of all matters of library economy.19 A special school, "Library School," organised at Albany under the sponsorship of the University of the State of New York, has offered young librarians the technical instruction they needed.20 Finally, an office, the Library Bureau, has undertaken the practical and commercial arrangements for all the improvements to which the organisation of libraries is susceptible.21 Other large bibliographical works were also successfully completed by the Americans such as the medical bibliography in 16 large volumes compiled by Billings which has been continued by the monthly Index Medicus.22 There was also the Alphabetical Index of Articles in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge by William J. Rhees.23
We do not wish to provide a history here, even less a listing of bibliographical writings. Thus, we have limited ourselves to mentioning some of the different forms bibliography has taken today. Along these lines, we would also mention the great Bibliographies of Bibliographies of Petzhold and Leon Vallee (the latter has collected the titles of about 11,000 fragmentary bibliographies).24 Attempts have also been made to list the publications of learned societies. J. Muller has done this in a very complete way for Germany.25 General lists, such as those of Brunet26 and Lorenz for France27, and Heinzius for Germany,28 cover all of a country's book production during a given period. The Royal Society of London has published a Catalogue of Scientific Papers in eight large volumes, an important international work but of limited usefulness because of its purely alphabetic arrangement.29 The Astronomical Bibliography of Houzeau and Lancaster30 smaller in size and scope, is superior to it in method. Let us also mention here the printing of the great catalogues undertaken by the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris,31 which today contains about two and a half million books, and by the British Museum which has a million and a half.22 These catalogues, still incomplete, are truly great monuments to human thought.
Bibliography has a glorious past behind it It can be proud of the works to which it has given birth, and certainly, as we have said above, everything does not remain to be done. But the importance of its mission becomes increasingly clear as the grandeur of the results already achieved permits us to conceive of increasingly far-reaching plans. Bibliography has arrived at that stage in its development where, from now on, it is more important to organise its riches than to create more. Various partial attempts have been made in this sense.
Some great libraries, such as the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the Konigliche Bibliotek in Berlin, the British Museum in London have created true bibliographical sections by placing volumes related to bibliography together and putting them at the disposal of readers without the need for any preliminary request Also by preparing up-
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 31
to-date card catalogues, these libraries partially satisfy the requirements of their public - but how incompletely still!
Some private, commercially organised agencies have undertaken to obtain for a fee particular information for those who request it from them. These agencies exist in several large cities and perform important services, but they must themselves undertake extensive, long, costly and necessarily incomplete searches. Bibliography, like the library which it complements, must become a free service.
International centres of scientific information related to special subjects have been proposed time and time again. Belgium is home for two such institutions - The International Colonial Institute and the Geologic Bureau.33
In 1889, an International Congress of Mathematicians met in Paris in order to adopt an enormous scheme of mathematical bibliography.34 The Congress agreed on an international classification whose elements are a combination of letters and numbers. It decided to publish a catalogue on separate cards which would permit successive intercalations. Since last November the Executive Committee of the Congress has regularly sent mathematicians of all countries packets of index cards, the filing of which is made extremely easy because the notation has been standardized.
The mathematical catalogue thus constituted has progressed considerably. The single regret that one might express here is that the editors have not been concerned enough with universal bibliography and that they have not regarded their work as a part of a greater whole. This consideration has been a dominant one for the Americans. Some years ago, the classification of their libraries was considerably standardized by the general adoption of the Decimal Classification invented by Melvil Dewey. More than 1,000 libraries in the United States have adopted this system. At the beginning of 1893 the government in Washington at its own cost printed a catalogue of 5,000 volumes selected from the best of those that could serve as a basic collection for public libraries. The catalogue, arranged according to the Decimal Classification, is a first and interesting attempt at bibliographic centralisation where the work is done by a few for the benefit of all. To certainty of technique, it adds all the advantages of economy.35 Finally, quite recently we have learned that the American Library Association has just undertaken the publication on cards of the titles of all new publications in the English language. These cards, having very full entries and bearing the number of the Decimal Classification, are sent by subscription to libraries, to booksellers and to individuals. They are useful for setting up both catalogues and bibliographic repertories. To us they constitute the greatest advance that has so far been made.36
Now studied in all countries and in all branches of knowledge, Bibliography has made considerable progress in this century. For want of sufficiently extensive agreement and co-operation, however, its development has been hindered. Unlike most of the sciences, it does not yet have either a common language or common units of classification which have been generally recognized and adopted. Nor has it succeeded in creating between individual works that coordination, advantageous in every way, that will be a result of the existence of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory.
32 Paul Ot let
Only an International Office of Bibliography can realize this double goal: the standardisation of classification and the co-ordination of individual efforts.
How to achieve standardisation in classification?
Because the enormous accumulation of printed materials has made classification necessary, different systems of classification have been suggested. They are of three main kinds. First, the titles of books are classified alphabetically by the author's name. This classification is inadequate from the bibliographical point of view because it supposes that the work one wants to consult on a subject is known in advance. It can only be used as a complement to classification by subject. This can be either a dictionary of principal headings (Stichworter) under which are placed relevant items, or a classified arrangement under whose logical divisions these same items are grouped.
So far both forms have had their partisans. Alleged in favour of the dictionary form is ease of searching resulting from the numerous and precise references that can be introduced into such a catalogue by means of multiple entry. The very real inconvenience of the system, however, lies in the infinite scattering of subjects. To take only one example, whatever deals with "work" will be distributed under the widely separated headings: legislation about work, hours of work, accidents of work, contracts for work, hygiene of workshops, Workers' Associations. Another inconvenience appears in relation to international bibliography: alphabetical order is not the same in all languages and it is necessary to know a language well in order to be able to use the dictionary catalogue successfully. For these reasons logical classification of materials has been preferred by a great many authors.
But this does not avoid all difficulties. While logical classification has advantages because it groups similar and related matters, and while to a certain extent it is more international because it uses logic which is more international than language, it has been criticised by a great many bibliographers. It is too arbitrary and supposes a considerable knowledge of the ideas that went into its construction on the part of those who wish to use it Moreover, the divisions and sub-divisions of a classification are generally expressed in headings very much more complex than those used in the dictionary form. From this arises difficulty and length of notation on the bibliographic cards and on the books themselves and the absence of any international language.
A recent form of classification combined the advantages of the two systems and avoided most of their disadvantages. The subjects were arranged according to a systematic order in which all the divisions and sub-divisions received a symbol that was equivalent and of the greatest possible conciseness - letters, numbers or combinations of letters and numbers. An alphabetical index completed this ingenious arrangement and listed all the words used in the system with their classification number opposite. If the third logical division of a subject (for example, "working hours" in a bibliography of economics) received the letter C, in the alphabetical index at "working hours" one would find, "See C."
The existence of this relatively practical system did not end^the troubles of bibliographers. From the moment bibliographies began to be sub-divided a little (and this is unavoidable if they are to be of real service), the indices became indecipherable hieroglyphs which no larynx could successfully pronounce, such as, for example, - Djkm, -Zwr, or even worse, -Sy3cd. The confusion became even greater because each author invented a particular system of standard signs without regard to those employed
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 33
by his predecessors and without any attention to those in use in the other branches of science. Authors who sought clarity more than anything else used numbers. To each division they gave a number drawn from a separate series. Though this was less complicated, once established the order was unchangeable. As soon as an error or an omission was noted, the harmony of the system was broken.
The Americans appear to us to have found a more nearly definitive solution to the problem. Indeed, it is to them that we owe the Decimal Classification, invented, as we have said, by Mr. Melvil Dewey, but adopted and popularised by the Association of Librarians of the United States and the Bureau of Education (Ministry of Public Instruction) in Washington. The principles of this classification have an inspired simplicity. All of human knowledge is divided into ten classes, to which corresponds one of the ten numerals, 0, 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Each class is subdivided into ten groups, each also represented by a numeral. Each group is, in its turn, divided into ten divisions expressed in the same way and so on. The ten classes are represented thus,
0. General works
1. Philosophy
2. Religion
3. Sociology
4. Philology
5. Sciences
6. Applied Sciences
7. Fine Arts
8. Literature
9. History
For the fifth class, for example, we have
5. Sciences
50. Sciences in general
51. Mathematics
52. Astronomy
53. Physics
530. Physics in general
531. Mechanics
532. Hydraulics
533. Gas
534. Acoustics
535. Optics
536. Heat
537. Electricity
538. Magnetism
539. Molecular Physics
54. Chemistry
55. Geology
56. Paleontology
57. Biology
58. Botany
59. Zoology
34 Paul Otlet
All the works concerning electricity are numbered 537. The first numeral, 5, indicates that the subject is related to the fifth class of human knowledge, that is to say, to science. The second numeral determines what division of science is in question. Here it is the third division to which, conventionally, the numeral 3 is given. All works in physics are, therefore, marked 53. But physics itself is broken into different sections, of which the seventh is electricity, according to a uniform, previously established classification. When the numeral 7 is added to the number 53 it individualises it and 537 indicates works which deal only with electricity. It becomes in this way a classification number (Class number). By limiting the number of parts in each division to a maximum of ten and by giving a standard number to each, Dewey has succeeded in pin-pointing the location of each subject, no matter how specific it may be, in the whole corpus of knowledge.
Indeed, the numerals which represent the classes and divisions of each subject come together in an extremely simple numerical expression: 537 in fact signifies nothing else but the fifth class, third section, seventh division. The links, the genealogy even, of ideas and objects, their relationships of dependence and subordination, of similarity and difference find suitable representation in the bibliographical expression formed in this way. This representation more or less excludes what is conventional and arbitrary. Not only does each numeral express in its particular way an essential idea, but the combination of numerals, that is to say their sequential ranking and their place in the whole number, follows the laws of scientific logic. In this sense they constitute a veritable new language whose phrases, here numbers, are formed according to constant syntactic rules from words, here numerals. It is a kind of agglutinative language: its numerals are its roots, predicative and attributive roots, purely verbal roots in the sense that they are not nouns, adjectives, or verbs. They are placed above and outside any grammatical category in that they express abstractions, pure scientific categories. Thus they translate ideas absolutely common to the entire scientific world and express them in universally understood signs - numbers. In this two-fold way, the Decimal Classification actually constitutes an international scientific language, a complete system for representing science which one day perhaps may bring help to intellectual workers analogous to that which they received from Latin in the Middle Ages and during the modern period.
While this philological aspect of the Decimal Classification is not without importance, from our bibliographical point of view, we must emphasize the classification's other advantages.
In the first place, as we have already said, all related subjects are grouped together. An alphabetical index in one or more languages, containing all the headings that can be searched and all synonymous and related headings, completes the systematic tables. The simplicity with which the classification numbers are formed gives the system considerable mnemonic value.
Because the numerals, no matter how many of them there are, are simple to read and concise to write, they can be easily transcribed on each card of a catalogue, each
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 35
book in a library, and these can thus receive a permanent location. All the cards, all the books having the same classification numbers, will be located next to each other without the person responsible for arranging them having to be initiated into the special knowledge needed to classify the documents. Only indexers need to know this. Even their task is very much facilitated because they need only to open the alphabetic index at one of the key words in the title of the book to be indexed to find a classification number for it immediately.
The classification is called Decimal in that each number indicates a more or less strict division of a whole which is assumed to be "one." Of course, the various branches and sub-branches of the sciences can be divided into more or fewer divisions. When it is necessary to increase the number of categories, one can use numbers containing four, five or seven digits, even more. When, however, the subject cannot be broken up in this way, numbers with two or three divisions will be used. Because the numbers are arranged solely on the basis of their decimal importance, the number of digits making them up does not matter, and related subjects, however sub-divided they may be, remain grouped together.
Works about electricity, for example, are given the class number 537. Those dealing with chemistry the class number 54. If a classifier does not wish to establish categories among works of chemistry and if he numbers them uniformly 54, then in the arrangement either of cards in a repertory or of books in a library, 537 will come before 54 since in the numerical series five hundred and thirty seven thousandths comes before fifty four thousandths. Thus, to express it in a general way, all the numbers beginning with 5 come before the numbers beginning with 6; all the numbers beginning with 53 come before all of the numbers beginning 54; all the numbers beginning with 537 come before those beginning with 538, just as in a dictionary all the words beginning Ab precede those beginning with Ac and all the words beginning with Aca precede those beginning with Acb.
The Decimal Classification, therefore, permits an exact localization of subjects. It is not without analogy to the system of anthropometric identification conceived by M. Bertillon which is used in the great European capitals with general satisfaction.37 It conforms to the essential principle of bibliographical order, as of all other kinds of order: a place for everything and everything in its place. It provides, moreover, a rational method of localization; this idea is the very essence of the system.
It is necessary, of course, to distinguish carefully scientific classification from bibliographic classification. The requirements of the two are not the same. All scientific classification is based on the definition of the objects to be classified, and this definition itself is finalised only when science itself has been fully developed. In the present state of the advancement of knowledge, a definitive classification ne varietur must be considered premature. If the finest minds are not even agreed on the most important points of a classification, how can one anticipate agreement on its details? Happily, this scholarly agreement is not necessary for a bibliographic classification. All that is necessary is a complete survey of the various subjects that are dealt with by the various branches of knowledge, a grouping of these subjects in the most generally accepted order, and finally, the determination of a fixed place for each of them. "To bibliography" is therefore, above all to label and provide a location for scientific materials.
36 Paul Otlet
A very complete, much studied, admirably simple classification in harmony with these views exists and has been applied for 17 years in America for the classification of books in libraries. The outline of this classification is complete and embraces the universe of knowledge. More than a hundred specialists have collaborated in developing and improving it so that by now it has about 10,000 main headings in the systematic tables and 22,000 words in the alphabetical index. This classification, moreover, can be developed indefinitely. It has, therefore, won the vote of the Office of Bibliography which proposes to use it as the basis for the Universal Bibliographical Repertory. Since what is important is a complete and universally understood system of location, it is necessary to adopt the Decimal Classification as a whole and to ask everyone to sacrifice his personal preferences in favour of the higher need for unity. The great and well deserved success which it has had in the United States and the lack of any bibliographical uniformity in Europe should put an end to any remaining hesitation [i ].
The International Office of Bibliography, therefore, possesses a system of classification whose excellence has been demonstrated by a first trial. To round out this system on which it has based its organisation, it has decided that all the bibliographical information it collects will be placed on separate cards. The principle of separate cards today needs no longer to be defended. They alone permit the maintenance of a permanent single order in the Repertory. Indeed, the Universal Bibliography is special in this, that it is built up continuously. It must register literary production as it comes to hand, hence repeated intercalations. On the other hand, the checking of older books will necessitate considerable work over a very long period. If the Repertory were to appear in book form, the fear of errors and omissions in such a considerable and definitive work would delay its publication indefinitely. The system of cards, on the contrary, allows small quantities of bibliographic materials to be issued even as and when they are prepared. Because a classification number on each card indicates its exact place in the Repertory, all the inconveniences inherent in this form of publication are avoided.
To the objections that catalogues on cards are difficult to make available to the public, who can disturb their arrangement, and that they have the inconvenience for the reader of giving only one piece of information at a time, Dr. Rudolph has made a triumphant reply by devising an ingenious piece of equipment whose description is as follows.
M. Rudolph inserts the cards, which he makes as small as possible, between two metal slides that are placed on the two sides of sheets of strong cardboard or very thin wood which thus constitute card-carriers. Each of these card-carriers is held to the others by means of easily detachable rods. They form, therefore, a kind of large book which resembles pretty closely the little albums in which photographs are pasted on a long band of cloth which folds up. \,
[1] In an appendix we give Specimens of the principal divisions of the Decimal Classification and of the detailed divisions for sociology. [not reproduced here] Complete translations in French, German and Italian are being prepared. •**
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 37
The card-carriers, each containing its bibliographical entries, are brought together end to end in an endless chain, and are placed in a wooden chest, about one metre in height, the upper part of which is made from glass. They rest there on two hexagonal drums which a crank turns backwards and forwards. The movement of the drums draws along the card-carriers which revolve under the glass. The chest is closed by a key: the public cannot touch the cards which it contains. The reader who desires information stands before the glass and turns the crank until the series of entries that he seeks appears. Four card-carriers, each able to contain 45 cards of three lines, appear for his inspection at the same time and thus give him all of the ease of reading a book. On the other hand, the advantages inherent in a card-system are maintained since the cards between the slides of the card-carriers can be moved and the possibility of adding new card-carriers whenever needed make the intercalation of future entries easy.39
In the Office's Repertory the cards are classed according to the Decimal Classification. To make searching easier, the bibliographical cards, which are white, are filed behind coloured divisionary cards which are higher than the others. These divisionary cards have the classification numbers on them. Their colour and their format vary with the degree of division they indicate. The bibliographical cards contain the name of the author, the title of the book, its size in number of pages, its format, the name of the publisher, the year of publication and the price of the volume, or the title of the periodical, the year, and the page. Each card also contains more or less complete bibliographic notes about the work being catalogued.
First, for all cards there is the classification number - that is to say, the classification number from the Decimal Classification - and an identification or order number. The Bibliographical Repertory is the Registry-General for works of the mind. It is important, therefore, that concurrently with the family name, here the classification number, each written work should receive its own individual name which is the identification number. In the Office's system this is a serial number which is never repeated twice. Each year a new series is begun which is distinguished from the others by the year itself which becomes a denominator. Thus, all the books and articles which appeared in 1895 belong to the same series, and numbers are given to books in the order in which they become known to the Office. This series has 1895 for its denominator, e.g. 12,525/1895 while the denominator of the series of books for 1848 is 1848, e.g. 12,525/1848 and so on.
It is possible, therefore, to identify each book while avoiding the inconvenience of numbers which are too large. On the other hand, these distinct sequences provide a basis for statistics for intellectual works - all the more readily because they are combined with classification numbers. It is possible to know for each year the total number of works published and the number of each kind of book. The identification number also facilitates the correction of errors. When any member of the vast bibliographical cooperative which the Office proposes to create, points out a classification error to the central administration or when the size of a category or the discovery of new or omitted subjects necessitates the creation of new sub-divisions, it will be easy to indicate to everyone concerned what corrections and changes should be made. The Office, for
38 Paul Otlet
example, by means of a periodical bulletin intended to maintain consistency of classification in all local Repertories, will announce that card 12,525/1895 classified at 525.3, should be placed at 525.2, or that the basic division 525.3 should henceforth be sub-divided into 525.31 and 525.32. As a consequence of this, the cards classified at the old division will be classified as follows:
Under 525.31 12,525/1895 12,537/1848 etc.
Under 525.32 536/1836 2741/1858 etc.
Another kind of annotation is possible for the cards of the Repertory: the location of each work, as recommended by M. Van der Haegen, the scholarly librarian of the University of Gand [Ghent].40 However, as important as such information is, it is impossible to have it on all the cards. A distinction must be made. When a work is truly rare, if it is held in only a few places, it is of international importance to know where these places are. But this is as useless as it is impossible for recent works. They have not yet had time to reach the great libraries or can be easily procured through the booktrade. Nevertheless, union catalogues can be easily organised on a national basis. In every capital city a general catalogue listing the contents of all the national depositories should be associated with the principal library. The Universal Bibliographic Repertory can serve as a basis for such catalogues.
Having indicated how the decimal classification of subjects and the arrangement of bibliographic entries on separate cards provide more or less definitive solutions to the most important questions which the creation of a Universal Bibliographical Repertory raises, we must now describe the plan of work which we propose. The immense size of the task to be undertaken is such that we can only hope to realize it by means of order, method and the utilization of all existing work.
First, it is necessary to avoid all delay while the work is being finished. It is also necessary to organise the work without trying to be complete and error-free from the beginning. The need for a single bibliographic repertory is so great that its implementation should not be further delayed by any pretext that it must be perfect from the outset Let us clear the ground first and rapidly accumulate two or three million of the most easily procured references. Let us resign ourselves to 25 or 30 per cent error either in the text of the notices or in the classification which will be given them. Errors and omissions will be corrected later, and very easily, because of the system of separate cards that we have described. These corrections will be a task for everyone, for, reproduced in a great many copies, the Repertory will be available for anyone to point them out.
The bibliography of older works should be prepared according to different procedures from those used for modern works. Let us examine separately the two kinds of work. For the past, a considerable number of special bibliographies exist. Leon Vallee has listed about eleven thousand of these in his Bibliographic des bibliographies.41 Many of these bibliographies duplicate each other. On the other hand, taken as a whole they are far from comprising a complete inventory of intellectual production up to the
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 39
present The first task which must be undertaken, therefore, is the indexing of the existing bibliographic sources and the preparation of a complete table of them, a sort of integrated bibliographic map showing, beside the regions already explored, those which remain to be discovered.
This vast work of co-ordination can only be completed successfully by a special institution, a permanent organisation for bibliographic interests which enjoys the popularity and scientific respect needed for it to be able to obtain everywhere the information necessary for its work. This institution, which will be the International Office of Bibliography, with the agreement of the authors most generally concerned with these matters will therefore first publish a huge bibliography of bibliographies on cards classified according to the Decimal Classification.
This first part of the repertory, containing the most general sources of knowledge and being immediately made available to all, will also be the first to benefit from the co-operation of all. Immediately afterwards will come the publication of the contents of the works thus listed. Here again it is a question of re-using existing work, but in the form peculiar to a catalogue. Through the efforts of the Office and of its collaborators, all duplication will be eliminated, and standardisation will be obtained because of the existence of a standard classification. While this undertaking is proceeding, and several years will be necessary for it alone, independent bibliographers will of course continue their work as in the past, and will, therefore, fill in gaps. The efforts of the Office towards unification, however, will help to draw the attention of researchers especially to areas which have so far been too much neglected, and thus, gradually, the blanks in the great bibliographical map will disappear.
One can foresee, also, that bibliographers will slowly modify the form of their work and will seek to benefit from the advantages which the Office will be able to offer them. They will bring their manuscripts to it as to a great publisher. The Office will acquire their work and incorporate it in the Repertory, perhaps even under the signature of each author. Bibliographers will be certain of finding - a rare thing today - a fair remuneration for their work and a special public to appreciate it. As for the Office of Bibliography, it will find numerous and valuable collaborators in these independent bibliographers.
Inventorying current production necessitates initiating other procedures. Here, also, however, the role of the Office is nearly exclusively that of organiser and co- ordinator. Numerous periodical national bibliographies and periodical special bibliographies exist They correspond to two distinct phases of work: national bibliographies for the most part limit themselves simply to the registration of published works. Listing and not classification is their principle task. Special bibliographies, on the other hand, give classification a major place and can undertake this work with all the more care in that they are less concerned with listing. Moreover, the best of them add indexing of periodicals to the indexing of books and this increases their usefulness considerably.
The appearance of the Universal Repertory will place no pressure on national bibliographies or special bibliographies to discontinue, but it is important that their role be better defined and that each takes its place in a better-organised whole. National bibliographies should be more complete in the future than they are now. Their publication is slow. Omissions are frequent and entries often very incorrect It is at this
40 Paul Ot let
point that the International Union of Berne must intervene.42 By everywhere recommending legal deposit, by bringing together all information about authors' copyright, and by undertaking, either alone or with the help of the governments which are members of the Union, to draw up a complete listing of current publishing, it could make a considerable contribution to the formation of a universal subject repertory, to which it would thus contribute actual materials.
As for special bibliographies, an agreement would have to be reached between them and the Office. They would maintain all the independence that they have now, but, in return for certain advantages to be stipulated by contract, they would undertake henceforth to adopt the Decimal Classification of the Office of Bibliography. The latter would thus be surrounded by absolutely competent groups which have long been equipped to carry out successfully the work they will be asked to do.
Having eliminated all of the inevitable duplication, the Office would re-issue the contents of these special publications in the form of a catalogue. Special bibliographical publications today cover almost the whole field of intellectual production. The Office will undertake to create such bibliographies for those branches of knowledge which hitherto have so far not had them. Already, on its initiative, three bibliographical periodicals have begun to take the steps we have been advocating. These are the Classified Indexes of Law, Sociology,43 and Philosophy.44 Classified indexes of philology and literature are in preparation.45
One can count on the fact, moreover, that publishers and authors themselves will become permanent collaborators in the repertory. They will find it a most efficacious advertising medium because copies of the repertory will be available in all intellectual centres and will be consulted daily by thousands of readers. Henceforth publisher's catalogues and announcements of new books will be re-issued with the help of the Office whose job it is to publish the repertory. There will be every benefit from this. Classification numbers, which will eventually be printed on the books themselves or at the top of articles in periodicals as part of their titles, will be expertly assigned. Useful notes, such as the principal chapters of a work, or even a succinct analysis of the subjects with which it deals, will be added to bare bibliographical entries. Each work dealing with several subjects will receive several cards.
This very general account is sufficient to demonstrate that a Universal Bibliographical Repertory is possible.
The programme recommended by the Office of Bibliography will doubtless provoke criticisms and reservations, but it seems difficult to deny its basic importance. We present it not as a personal work but as the synthesis of what has been done and proposed by a great number of bibliographers of every country.
The measures by which this programme will be realized practically are the following:
1 . The creation of an International Institute of Bibliography, whose object will be the study of all questions related to bibliography in general and more especially the
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 41
elaboration of the Universal Repertory. This Institute will have to decide on bibliographical standards and take all necessary measures for their adoption by all who are interested: scholars, librarians, publishers, and authors.
2. A great extension to the work commenced by the International Office of Bibliography. The Office will become the executive organ for the decisions of the Institute of Bibliography. This Office, whose organisation at the moment is only provisional, will be definitively constituted on the basis of a vast co-operative society whose members will be all those who are interested in the creation of a Universal Repertory: states, government departments, scientific associations, librarians, publishers, authors, and scholars. A Universal Repertory will be published by this Office on cards classified according to the Decimal Classification. All bibliographical material presently existing will be fused in the Repertory. Local Bibliographical Offices, open to all and in continuous receipt from the Central Office of bibliographical notices printed on cards, will be created in all cities and in all intellectual centres. These local Offices will be important components of all the great libraries where they will quickly be identified with the Libraries' cataloguing sections, today so costly to maintain and of such incomplete usefulness.
3. An International Bibliographical Union between governments. They will guarantee to undertake all necessary measures for the regular registration of books and will encourage the elaboration of the Repertory by subscribing to copies on a pro-rated basis according to their respective populations and the amount of their annual literary production.
Editor's Notes
1. H. La Fontaine et P. Otlet, "Creation d'un Repertoire Bibliographique Universel: note pr61iminaire," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 15-38. This was issued separately for the International Conference of Bibliography in Brussels in 1895 and was published in 1896 as Publication No.l of The Office International de Bibliography. The text is followed by specimen tables of the Decimal Classification: a first table (10 major classes), a second table (100 major sub-divisions), a third table with 336, Public Services, subdivided to as many as 4 places after the decimal point, and a fifth table, a specimen of the index to the tables.
The motto with which Otlet heads his paper, "Who knows where knowledge may be had is near to having it" appeared on each edition of Poole's Index (see note 17 to this paper). W.I. Fletcher reports that the tradition is that Poole had it from the then professor of Latin at Yale, James L. Kingsley, and that it has no classical origin {Library Journal 20 (1896):316). It was used frequently on IIB publications. It first appeared on the 1894[?] prospectus for the L'Office international de bibliographic sociologique.
2. Otlet refers here to the 6th International Geographical Congress to which was presented a report by Prof. Dr. Briickner on what had been done to carry out the decisions of the 5th Congress about compiling geographical bibliographies for all the states. Bruckner indicated what was afoot in various states in the bibliography of
42 Paul Otlet
geography, and his resolution, that further study of the questions of geographical bibliography be undertaken, was adopted {Report of the Sixth International Geographical Congress ...London: John Murray, 1896, pp. 387-389). Bruckner's report and some brief remarks on the bibliographical work of the Congress appeared in the IIB Bulletin 1(1895-96): 130-133.
3. Details of the discussions about the scheme of the Association francaise pour l'Avancement des Sciences are given by its secretary M. Gariel in a statement on the resolutions adopted by the Congress of the Association at its meeting in Bordeaux, August 1895. The statement appears in IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 62-66. The problems examined by the Society were those of formulating precise titles for scientific papers and how to choose title words for subject indexes.
4. The report of the Dresden meeting of the International Literary and Artistic Congress for the Protection of Intellectual Property (which was closely associated with the Bureau of the Berne Copyright Union) indicated that the subject of a universal catalogue had been discussed at previous conferences but that never before had an actual proposal for the creation of such a catalogue been submitted. Jules Lermina, 1839-1919, a journalist, prolific author of popular novels, and also the permanent secretary of the Association, promoted the scheme. The Dresden Meeting agreed that the proposed catalogue was in the international interest but, because of some suspicion of and opposition to the project, deferred studying ways of carrying it out until a later meeting (Droit d'auteur 4 (1895): 138). It should be noted that Otlet and La Fontaine were present at this meeting, which followed by about three weeks the first International Conference of Bibliography at which the UB had been founded. They spoke out against "pessimistic views" which had been expressed as to the feasibility of a universal catalogue and described how they proposed to go about it in Brussels.
5. The setting up in 1894 of a committee of the Royal Society to study the creation of a "scientific subject-catalogue which it is proposed to carry out by means of international co-operation" and the distribution throughout the learned world of a circular letter of enquiry about support for such a venture are described in the "President's Address" Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 57 (1895): 44. The IIB Bulletin reprinted these and most other documents issued by the Royal Society on the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature in the first decade of the century.
6. The subject of a great catalogue had been raised in 1893 before the Class of Letters of the Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres, et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique by Ferdinand Van der Haeghen, the Librarian of the University of Gand. His communication, "On a General catalogue of Public Libraries" discussed how an international union catalogue could be compiled and printed by an International Bureau of Bibliography (Bulletins de VAcadimie royale des sciences et des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 3rd Series, 26 (1893): 690-94). The scheme essentially derived from Van der Haeghen's own monumental Bibliotheca belgica which had been under preparation for fifteen years and was being issued in the form of separate slips for each book described.
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 43
The Academy set up a committee to consider Van der Haegen's proposals and a favourable report was received (Bulletins de I'Acadimie royale des sciences des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, 3rd Series, 27 (1894): 397-402). The report included a draft constitution of a Bureau Bibliographique International. Before the Academy approached the Belgian government to put the scheme into effect, the report suggested that the opinions and agreement of the other sections of the Academy should be obtained. Michel Mourlon, director of the Class of Sciences in the Academy, later director of the Belgian Geological Commission, described what the commission had undertaken for geological bibliography in Belgium. He indicated that the Academy had just received the proposals for an International Catalogue of Scientific Literature from the Royal Society in London. He proposed that the Class of Sciences set up a committee to consider whether a common scheme could be worked out with the other Classes of the Academy to support Van der Haegen's proposal or whether scientific literature should be dealt with separately. In this case, the question then arose as to what kind of response should be made to the Royal Society's letter if the Belgium government's support of the scheme could be assured (Michel Mourlon, "Sur le creation d'un Bureau International de Bibliographic" Bulletins de I'Academie royale des sciences, des lettres et des beaux- arts de Belgique, 3rd Series, 27 (1894):474-4)
7. Antoine Teissier, 1632-1715, a Protestant forced from France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, took up residence in the Court of Frederick I of Prussia. A renowned scholar, among his many works, most of them translations from Latin and Greek, was Catalogus auctorum qui librorum catalogos, indices, bibliothecas, virorum litteratorum vitas elogia, aut orationes funebres scriptis consignarunt . . . Geneva, 1686 and 1705. This was a revised and enlarged version of the Bibliotneca bibliothecarum of Phillippe Labbe" (1607-1667). It was followed by a supplement in 1705.
8. Francesco Marucelli, 1623-1703, collected works of art and a great library. His Mare magnum omnium materiarum sive index universalis alphabeticus was a manuscript index in 112 folio volumes of all that he had read during the course of his life. It is preserved in the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence, a "public" library (opened in 1752) that was set up to receive a bequest of books and pictures from him.
9. Fabianus Justinianus, 1578-1627, was later in life Bishop of Ajaccio. Before his elevation he had care of the Biblioteca Vallicelliana for the order of Saint Phillip Neri of which he was a member. His Index universalis alphabeticus, materias in omni facultate consulte pertractans, eorumque scriptores et locos designans, appeared in Rome in 1612.
10. Georg Draud, 1573-1630 (or 1635), Lutheran pastor of Ortenberg, was responsible for a number of "laborious compilations" of various kinds (Michaud). He is chiefly remembered for his bibliographical works based on catalogues of the Frankfurt book fairs: Bibliotneca classica . . . 1611, Bibliotneca exotica . . . 1610 and Bibliotneca librorum germanicorum classica . . . 161 1. The three works were extensively revised
44 Paul Ot let
and reprinted in 1625. They were praised highly by Schneider as among the most important accomplishments of German bibliography before the Thirty Years' War.
11. Raffaelo Savonarola, 1646-1730, was a member of the order of the Theatines, a Roman Catholic religious order devoted to "the renovation of the priestly and apostolic life by means of prayer, the practice of poverty, and study" (Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, "Religious Orders (Christian)". In 1698 and 1714 Savonarola issued the prospectus for his Orbis litterarius universalis which was to be a bibliography on the model provided by Draud and Lipenius of works issued in all languages up to 1700. The work represented twenty years of labour and the manuscript comprised forty folio volumes. Universus terrarum orbis scriptorum calamo delineatus . . . which appeared in 1713 is thought to be the only portion of the grander work to be published. It was issued under the pseudonym, Alphonsus Lasor a Varea. The manuscript of the Orbis Uterarius Universalis, still extant towards the end of the eighteenth century in the Library of the Theatines in Padua, appears to have been lost at some time in the nineteenth century.
12. Martin Lipenius, 1630-1692, was a German scholar who occupied various academic posts during a lifetime that was shortened, it has been said (Michaud), by exhaustion from the excesses of his labours, though a span of sixty-two years does not, for the period, seem unduly abbreviated. The bibliographies published in Frankfurt by Johannes Fridericus were called "Real" because they were arranged alphabetically by subject word, not alphabetically by author.
13. Johann Heinrich Christoph Beutler, 1759-1833, held a number of teaching and ecclesiastical posts. His "Universal Subject Index of the Important German Periodicals and Magazines" was followed in 1793 by Moral Philosophy and Worldly Wisdom which was in its seventh edition by 1816.
14. Samuel Ayscough, 1745-1804, eventually obtained employment at the British Museum as an assistant librarian, and was later ordained He has been called a "Prince of Index-Makers" (Dictionary of National Biography). As well as the index to the Monthly Review mentioned by Otlet, he was responsible for an index to the Gentleman's Magazine for the years 1731-86 (this was issued in 1789) and, among many other indexes, for a concordance to Shakespeare's plays in 1790. Volume I of the General Index to the Monthly Review . . . completing the first series of that work in two parts, had a first part "Containing a Catalogue, With the Size and Price, of all the Publications reviewed"; the second had the title as given by Otlet. (for an account of Ayscough see W. Boyd Rayward, "The Perils of Bibliography...").
15. A history of the Bibliographic de la France, begun in 181 1, is provided in its special September 1961 issue, "Num6ro du cent-cinquantenaire," of T6dition francaise" (CI. de Buzareingues, "Historique de la Bibliographie de la France," pp. ix-xxxvi).
16. Bibliotheca philological oder, Geordnete uebersicht oiler auf dem gebiet der classischen Alterthumswissenschaft wie alteren und neuern sprachwissenschaft neu erschienenen bucher . . . 1-50 jahrg., 1848-97. This, with variation in sub-title, was a semi-annual from 1848-85, and then a quarterly; Bibliotheca orientalis or, a Complete List of Books, Papers, Serials and Essays Published in 1876 in England
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 45
the Colonies, Germany and France on the History, Languages, Religions, Antiquities, Literature and Geography of the East. Comp. by Charles Friederici. London: Trubner and Co., 1877-1884; Zeitschrift fitr die gesamte medicin mit besonderer RUcksicht auf Hospitalpraxis und ausldndischen Literatur. Edited by J J7. Dieffenbach, J.C.G. Fricke and F.W. Oppenheim. This appeared in Hamburg in 45 volumes between 1836 and 1851.
17. Poole's An Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in the Reviews and Other Periodicals which appeared as a slim volume of 154 pages in 1848, comprised 1442 pages by the third edition of 1882. It was compiled "with the assistance as associate editor of William I. Fletcher . . . and the cooperation of the American Library Association and the Library Association of the United Kingdom." In fact, Poole's attempt to enlist English help on his Index was not particularly successful. Various revised editions of Poole and a series of supplements were issued between 1888 and 1908. Publication of the Cooperative Index to Periodicals, edited by Fletcher, was begun in 1884 and it eventually covered the period 1883 through 1891. Intended as an attempt to keep Poole's Index current, it was first issued as monthly supplements to the Library Journal. Later it became quarterly and in 1890 and 1891 appeared only as an annual. The necessity for it was obviated by the appearance in 1901 of H.W. Wilson's Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature which is still issued.
18. This Section of the American Library Association was to be "an organisation for cooperative catalog and index work" and among the tasks proposed for it were collaboration with publishers in the printing of catalogue cards for new works and the preparation of the ALA Index to General Literature. An account of the ALA Publishing Section and a brief description of the ALA Index appeared in TLB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 135-136.
19. An unsigned editorial, doubtless by the editor, Melvil Dewey, in what was initially called the American Library Journal, September 30, 1876, sums up (p. 13) the objectives of the journal: "In a word the American Library Journal hopes to collate for the librarian every view or fact which may be of use or interest in his work, to the saving of time, money, and effort for him, and, as a final aim, to the advancement of his honorable profession."
20. The story of Melvil Dewey's School of Library Economy, first opened in 1884 at Columbia University has been told many times; see for example, Sarah Vann, Training for Librarianship Before 1923, Carl White, A Historical Introduction to Library Education, and for an interpretative account of the failure to keep the school at Columbia, W. Boyd Ray ward, "Melvil Dewey and Education for Librarianship". The School opened at Albany in 1889 in the New York State Library under the auspices of the State University. The account of the school in IIB Bulletin 1 (1895- 96): 138-139 does not indicate that the MLS and DLS degrees as well as the BLS (described as bachelier-is-sciences bibliologique) could be awarded.
21. The Library Bureau of Boston was begun by Melvil Dewey responding in part to the efforts of and the needs represented by the American Library Association's Supplies Committee. Under the management of RE. Davidson, as Fremont Rider says "it
46 Paul Otlet
became a pioneer in revolutionizing, not merely library equipment ~ which, as a matter of fact, in a few years became only a side line in their sales ~ but office equipment and business methods generally (Fremont Rider, Melvil Dewey, p. 65). Eventually it became part of the Remington Rand Company. The Library Bureau was important to Otlet and La Fontaine. They did business with its London branch, managed by Cedric Chivers, and had several meetings with Davidson in an attempt to induce him to set up a European branch in Brussels.
22. John Shaw Billings, 1839-1939, supervised the publication of the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office, United States Army, in 16 volumes from 1880 to 1895. This was called an index-catalogue because it indexed articles in journals. It was arranged, however, as a dictionary catalogue. Billings became the first director of the New York Public Library in 1896. An unsigned review of the Index-Catalogue was published in the IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 255-56. Frederick Leypoldt began to publish Index Medicus, a Monthly Classified Record of the Current Medical Literature of the World, in 1879. It was edited by Billings and Robert Fletcher. Always precarious financially, it continued to be published after Leypoldt's death in 1884 in the United States until 1899. French associates of Otlet and La Fontaine, Charles Richet and Marcel Baudouin, were then to assume responsibility for attempting to keep it going in Paris until 1902. (Bibliographers tend not to list the French publication in their accounts of the various series of Index Medicus). The work has been published under various auspices in the United States from 1903 until the present.
23. Otlet is referring here to: Catalogue of Publications of the Smithsonian Institution (1846-1882) with an alphabetical index of Articles in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Miscellaneous Collections, Annual Reports, Bulletins and Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum and Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, by William J. Rhees. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1882. Rhees, 1830-1907, had been made Chief Clerk of the Smithsonian in 1852 and, as executive officer under the Secretary, had oversight of the affairs of the Institution and responsibility for its publications. He was regarded at the time of his death as "the principal human repository" of the history of the Institution, for his knowledge extended back to the actual founding period (Dictionary of American Biography).
24. Julius Petzholdt, Bibliotheca bibliographica . . . W. Englemann: Leipzig: 1866. The work of Petzholdt, a librarian, has sometimes been regarded as a model for the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of bibliographies. Taylor provides a full and critical account of this work. As for size, Taylor accepts Besterman's estimate that the work contains references to 5,500 titles.
Leon Vallee's Bibliographie des bibliographies, (Paris, 1883) had a supplement issued in 1887. Vallee's work has been somewhat indiscriminately condemned. Taylor evaluates and supports criticisms of it and refers to reviews and other accounts. A large work, the number of titles included, however, is nearer 10,000 than the 11,000 Otlet mentions and, if Langlois is correct, a third of these should have been omitted and another third added (Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique).
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 47
25. Johannes Miiller, Die Wissenschaftlichen vereine und gesellschaften Deutschslands im neunzehnten jahrhundert. Berlin, 1883-87. Muller, 1850-1919, was at one time Director of the Reichstagbibliothek in Berlin. Langlois describes this work as classic, but points out that, though it gives general bibliographic information, it is not an index to the contents of these publications (Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique).
26. Jacques Charles Brunet, 1780-1867, Manuel du Librairie et de V amateur de livres, 1810. The first edition of three volumes grew to six in the fifth and final edition which appeared between 1860-65. The sixth volume, after a history of classification systems, disposes the author entries of the first five volumes according to a system of classification that was to be widely imitated in its time. Brunet, born into the bookselling trade, devoted himself exclusively to bibliography after the death of his father in 1824. It has been said of his work that, "with eclat it brought to a close the era of great general bibliographies and continues to be irreplaceable" (Malcles, Manuel).
27. Otto Lorenz, Catalogue g&n&al de la librairie frangaise, 1867-88. This listed all French imprints from 1840 to 1865. Lorenz issued supplements covering the period to 1885. It was then continued by other hands. By 1945 when it ceased publication, the work was in 34 volumes and covered the period 1840 to 1925. Lorenz, 1831- 1893, was born in Leipzig but set up in the book trade in Paris in 1853 and was naturalized as a Frenchman in 1866.
28. Wilhelm Heinsius, 1768-1817, published his Allgemeines Bucher-Lexicon in 1793. Subsequent editions by Heinsius himself and, after his death, by others, provided a retrospective bibliography in nineteen volumes of German publishing from 1700 to 1894.
29. Otlet refers to the two series of the Catalogue of Scientific Papers published by the Royal Society of London that had appeared up to this time. See Editor's note 19 to Paper 1, "Something About Bibliography," in this volume.
30. Jean-Charles Houzeau de Lehaie and Albert-Benoit-Marie Lancaster, Bibliographie genirale de V astronomic. The work is bibliographically confusing. Intended to be in three volumes, only volumes I (and only two of three parts intended for this volume) and II were issued. The work appeared in parts in paper covers between 1880 and 1889 together with some supplementary material. Volume II was the first to be published and the second part of this was published first. Because volume II appeared first, the compilers' introduction appeared at the beginning of it. Both practicing scientists, Houzeau and Lancaster were colleagues in the Royal Observatory of Belgium, where the former was Director and the latter librarian and Secretary. Dewhirst believes that after Houzeau's death in 1888, Lancaster lost spirit to complete the work. It was intended to provide a complete record of "all that had been written about the science of the heavens since the beginning of history, including not only printed works, but all the earlier manuscripts that were known" (Dewhirst, "Editorial Introduction," General Bibliography of Astronomy to the Year 1880).
48 Paul Otlet
31. Printing of the general alphabetical catalogue of the Bibliotheque national e did not begin until 1897. The first volume of a series of subject catalogues, however, Section L., Catalogue of the History of France, appeared in 1855 and there were a good many of these subject catalogues begun before it was decided in 1874 to abandon this procedure, complete those in process and then begin publication of the general catalogue. It is to these "catalogues mdthodiques" that Otlet refers.
32. Printing of the General Catalogue of the British Museum began in 1881. It was completed in 1900 in 94 volumes. A supplement of 13 volumes was issued in 1905. A lively account of this complex venture is given in Barbara McCrimmon, Power, Politics, and Print: The Publication of the British Museum Catalogue 1882-1900.
33. The Institut Colonial International was founded in January 1894 to facilitate and develop the comparative study of administration and law in colonial territories.
One assumes Otlet refers to the Service Geologique of the Ministere de llndustrie and du Travail though it was not formally set up by Royal Decree until December 1896. Its mission was to preserve all existing data and to assimilate to them the results of all new observations carried out on Belgian territories. It acquired national and international literature on all aspects of the geologic strata, terrain and sub-soils of these territories. The Director was Michel Mourlon(see also Note 6 above), who was much interested in problems connected with geological literature and classification, and the Secretary, G. Simoens, who made a number of studies of the Decimal classification.
34. For the International Bibliography of Mathematics see Otlet's discussions in and Editor's Note No. 18 to the first paper, "Something about Bibliography," in this volume.
35. U.S. Bureau of Education, Catalog of the ALA Library: 5,000 volumes for a Popular Library Selected by the American Library Association and Shown at the World's Columbian Exposition. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893. The Catalog, sometimes called the ALA Catalog or ALA Model Library Catalog, is in three parts: Part I is a classified catalogue according to the Decimal Classification; Part II is a classified catalogue according to Charles Ami Cutter's Expansive Classification; Part III is a dictionary catalogue. The Introduction to the Catalog is explicit: "The question whether a classed or dictionary catalogue is more useful is still unsettled though much has been written on the subject" (p. viii). Otlet is thus a little too carefully selective in the detail he gives of the work! The account of the Catalog in IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 137, though expatiating on its utility, equally ignores Parts II and in.
36. A good description of various attempts, begun almost from the inception of ALA, to obtain centralised cataloguing is provided by Edith Scott's "The Evolution of Bibliographical Systems in the United States, 1876-1945." Otlet refers to efforts begun in the Publishing Section in 1887 and represented by an announcement by the Library Bureau: "Printed Catalog Cards for Current Books: A Guaranteed Fact Not a Mere Experiment," Library Journal 18 (1893): 528-30. The experiment, for it was in fact no more than that, was not successful, had few subscribers, only limited support
A Universal Bibliographic Repertory 49
from publishers and was transferred in 1896 to the ALA's Publishing Section, the whole business being surrendered "with great satisfaction" by the Publishing Section to the Library of Congress when the Library began issuing its cards in 1901 (Library Journal 26 (1901): 757).
37. Alphonse Bertillon, 1853-1914, developed a system of identification of criminals which was used by the Parisian police and later in other countries. It consisted of making a numerical and verbal "portrait" so precise and systematic that it would provide proof of identity. This procedure, according to Bertillon, "consists less in the search for new characteristic elements of individuality than in the discovery of a method of classification." Bertillon believed he had discovered such a method involving anthropometric identification which required, 1) careful measurements of specific parts of the body; 2) descriptive identification in words using a controlled vocabulary of hair and eye colour, for example; and 3) identification by peculiar marks. The identification was then recorded on a special card ("Introduction," to Bertillon's Signaletic Instructions). The system was introduced in 1882 and was constantly refined.
38. Two publications seem relevant to Otlet's description of the tables being prepared at this time. First is a document of 14 unpaged leaves: Decimal Classification. Tables ginirales, General summaries, Hauptatheilungen. Bruxelles: Office International de Bibliography, 1895. This contained the first thousand divisions in French. A fuller version for Sociology and Law was: Decimal Classification: Sociology, Sozialwissenschaft, Sociologie. Tables mithodique et alphabitique; Methodischer und Alphabetischer Index; Methodical and Alphabetical Index. Bruxelles: Office International de Bibliographique, 1895. This consisted of 78 unnumbered pages of the tables for Sociology and Law with notes and with, even at this stage, an indication of synthetic developments; for example, under 327 International Politics are scope notes, "see also" references and examples such as 327 (45:494) Italian- Swiss Conflict. The table for Law, 340 includes numerical developments for "Generalities" and auxiliary sciences: for example, 340.005 periodicals and reviews; 340.09, Law and history; 340.09.2 "legal Biographies, classed alphabetically." The index is a simple tri-lingual list. A number of translations of other major sections of the classification were issued in 1896.
39. Rudolph describes a part of this apparatus (the binder, not the drum) in his "The Newberry Genealogical Index" in The Library Journal, (1899): 53-55. A recent evaluation of Rudolph's binder and the Rudolph Continuous Indexer is given in Rick J. Ashton's "Curators, Hobbyists, and Historians: Ninety years of Genealogy at the Newberry Library." Rudolph was a fascinating character. He fought in the Russo- Austrian War in 1866. He came to New York in 1875 and eventually joined the Newberry Library in Chicago in 1894 where he invented the Rudolph Indexer and Binder. He left the Newberry in 1909 to speculate on the stock market In 1915 at the age of 65 he married his second wife and in 1917 committed suicide because he had lost most of his money and was going blind and deaf (information from newspaper clippings and the Newberry Librarians' Reports courtesy of Diana Haskell, Newberry Library).
50 Paul Otlet
40. See Editor's Note 6 in this paper.
41. See Editor's Note 24 in this paper
42. The Berne International Copyright Union was set up in 1886. An office or bureau created for it by the Swiss government began operations in 1887. The text of the convention governing the Union has been revised a number of times and the 100 years of the Union's operation the number of nations joining it has steadily grown. The United States did not become a member until 1988. The purpose of the union was, and, is to protect the literary and artistic rights of authors. At the time Otlet was writing the following states were members: Belgium, France, Germany, Haiti, Italy, Siberia, Spain, Switzerland, Tunis and Great Britain.
43. Otlet and La Fontaine refer to: Sommaire methodique des traites, monographies et revues de droit. This began with a similar name in 1891, and volumes 1-3, 1891- 1893, were prepared by Otlet, Pierre Blanchemanche and Joseph Cassiers. In 1895 volume 4 (for 1894) was taken over by Otlet and La Fontaine and was published by the Office International de Bibliographic It was part of what was described as the Bibliographie Internationale des sciences sociales. The second part of this, also published by Otlet and La Fontaine, was Sommaire methodique des traites, monographies et revues de sociologie. For the 1895 volume both works were combined to become Bibliographia sociologica: Sociologie et droit. Sozialwissenschaft und Recht. Sociology and Law. Sommaire methodique des traitis et des revues dresse conformement d la Classification Decimale. Only the one volume seems to have been issued.
44. Maurice de Wulf, editor of the Revue nio-scolastique (published by the Soci&e" Philosophique headquartered in Louvain at the Institut Superieur de Philosophic), undertook to add a bibliographical supplement to the Revue. The first issue appeared as Sommaire ideologique des ouvrages et des revues de philosophic, 20 July 1895. It had an account of the Decimal Classification and a discussion of certain problems in the Classification. This introduction was repeated verbatim in the first issue for 1896 (supplement to the February 1st 1896 Revue) with further commentary added. Following this were the tables of the Decimal Classification for philosophy as developed in Louvain at that time. This bibliographic work continued until the First World War and, indeed, has continued in some form ever since. In a brief note on the OIB and the 1895 Conference of Bibliography, de Wulf describes the Sommaire ideologique as "an experimental application of the Dewey system, the first application to our knowledge which has been presented to the Belgian public, and perhaps to the European public." {Revue neo-scolastique 2(1895): 429). The bibliographic supplement was referred to as Bibliographia philosophica.
45. The periodicals for philological and literary bibliography that Otlet refers to do not seem to have been published. In these bibliographies and the rationale provided for them lies the beginning of the Bibliographia Universalis.
3. ON THE STRUCTURE OF CLASSIFICATION NUMBERS1
When the Brussels Conference adopted Mr. Dewey's classification as a whole, it did not intend to proclaim that the classification was to be considered perfect in every respect. The Conference did agree that it was sufficiently developed to be used as the preliminary basis for the Universal Bibliographic Repertory and was convinced that its principles were such as to assure its future development. The articles published in this issue of the Bulletin by Mssrs. Cams,2 Baudouin,3 Daruty de Grandpre\4 and Simoens5 as well as the documents issued by the Royal Society of London6 clearly suggest the different kinds of research being undertaken in order to improve the Decimal Classification and to make it responsive to all the requirements of bibliographic registration and analysis.
Considering this general question of its development in our turn, we would like to add some observations to those already published here [l] or set out previously in a note published by the International Office of Bibliography [2]. These observations synthesize propositions that have been advanced from various viewpoints on the structure of classification numbers but upon which no final pronouncement has yet been made.
The basic principle of a bibliographic classification in the first analysis should be sought in the best way of subordinating the various general characteristics exhibited by the works being classified. It is a vast synoptic outline, divided into classes, divisions and sections, of all the subjects on which it is possible to write. The major difficulty, apart from completely enumerating the subjects to be classified, is this: classification can be made from different points of view and the subordination of the characteristics of each subject is susceptible of equally satisfactory but quite different solutions. Let us take the example:
(a) Civil Law, Marriage, English Legislation, which we index: 347.62(42). Why should that order be preferred to this:
(b) England, Civil law, Marriage.
It could be just as useful to have everything concerning Marriage gathered together without distinction of country (a), as to find gathered together everything concerning English Law, without distinguishing between different institutions (b).
This first observation is best expressed by saying that the standard model of any classification, whether it is constructed by means of words or these words translated into decimal indices, is an array of ideas, each defining and specifying the other. The sense of A is defined by B, thus A:B. Moreover, as a general rule, each idea so subordinated can, in its turn, become a principal idea to which is subordinated other ideas on which it
[1] See Bulletin, p. 29 and 86.
[2] Regies pour les developpements a apporter a la classification decimale publiees par l'Office International de Bibliographic, Bruxclles, 1896. 7
51
52 Paul Otlet
depends. Thus, in the example given, English Legislation, which is subordinated to the division Marriage in the first instance, becomes the principal heading in the second instance.
To this first observation, which touches upon classification only, another concerning bibliographical notation can be added. Classification numbers are formed by a kind of derivation by which a more general idea is made more specific by the juxtaposition of simple numerals. In fact, this is the most elementary form of the structure of classification numbers. To strip bibliographical notation of any meaning so that it becomes numerals put together into occasionally quite large numbers which can be distinguished only by external differences with little mnemonic value, is to deprive the notation of an element of diversity which could help make the terms intelligible to the ordinary reader. Now, one quickly observes that there are certain basic ideas which are present in all parts of the classification, such as geographical, historical and form categories which we have already discussed. In any individual branch of the classification there are also divisions which recur regularly; thus, in Zoology, for example, each species can be envisaged from the point of view of its anatomy, its evolution, its teratology,8 its form, its economic usefulness.
The consequence of this observation is that a structure of classification numbers is desirable such that to each category of basic ideas which regularly recurs, there should correspond a form of notation with a distinct appearance and a permanent meaning. Classification numbers will then be complex numerical expressions made up of different factors whose respective meanings when juxtaposed will express a complex idea after the fashion of compound words in spoken languages. If the geographic category, England, is always expressed by the symbol (42), and if this symbol can be directly combined with all or part of any classification number, the problem that we have just described is completely resolved, at least so far as a special case is concerned. We are effectively able to write:
347.62(42) Legislation concerning Marriage in England 709(42) History of art in England 595.77(42) The Diptera of England
There is no doubt that generalizing such a method of notation would be useful. First of all, it is eminently mnemonic. Next it increases the intelligibility of the classification numbers since a simple examination of the component factors of their external structure at once reveals the various individual ideas that make up the whole idea. These factors, once they are clearly distinguished from each other, can form a variety of combinations. Thus, it is possible to represent more than a million ideas by the combinations derived from a seven-digit number. Several millions of ideas can be represented when second-degree combinations, that is to say, those involving factors or parts of numbers, are added to these first-degree combinations.
Indeed, the parenthesis (42) = England, is susceptible theoretically of being combined with any classification number and thus of creating thousands of new subdivisions. Finally, the last advantage of proceeding in this way is that preserving the individuality of each structural component makes possible a different notation for the same idea to be classified according to whichever element one wishes to make primary, others being subordinated to it. Thus, while the meaning of the following three classification numbers is preserved because the factors are reversible, it is possible to write:
Structure of Classification Numbers 53
(42)347.62 347.62(42) 347(42)62
In addition, notation by means of factors permits the independent development of each in the future. For example, if we were to write:
59 1 . 1 Physiological Zoology
59 1 . 14 Physiological Zoology of molluscs
when, later, it is thought opportune to divide Physiological Zoology not by species but by the major subjects of Physiology, such as Circulation, Respiration, or the Nervous System, this can no longer be done. It would be quite otherwise if we had first written:
59 1 . 1 : 954 Physiological Zoology: Molluscs which can be
developed later thus: 59 1 . 1 1 : 5945[sic for 9545?] Physiological Zoology, respiration: Molluscs,
Cephalopods pj.
The question of opportunity resolved, what remains to be examined is whether the following theoretical formulation for the internal structure of classification numbers can possibly be realized in practice: "Classification numbers are formed sometimes by derivation - by making a more general idea more specific by the juxtaposition of numerals, sometimes by combination - by adding factors or autonomous numerical elements which have a distinct and permanent meaning and which are able to assume different functions in relation to each other." This latter method helps to make the decimal classification a veritable bibliographical pasigraphy9 able to translate into a number any idea to be classified and to cope with all the details of bibliographical analysis [4].
Let us observe, fust, that these elements or factors cannot be numerals pure and simple. While it is convenient to attribute the idea, "England," to 42, it is impossible without confusion to combine these two digits with any number: 597.42, for example, would indicate simultaneously Alcanthodidei and English fish. Thus, when one is forming numbers by simple derivation, it is always useful and desirable to use the same numbers or parts of numbers to express the same ideas. To establish a symmetrical correspondence between the subdivisions of the different parts of the classification, one should take the subdivisions of one subject area and use them as divisions of another. Thus, it is mnemonic to write 611.8 Anatomy of the Nervous System, 612.8 Physiology of the Nervous System, 613.8 Health of the Nervous System, for the technique of mnemonics uses symmetry as much as logic.
[3] Let us observe in passing that the intelligibility of a classification number does not depend on its conciseness, but on its apparent structure which permits the eye to read synthetically groups of figures corresponding to distinct ideas. The algebraic formula for the hyperbola is bx2 - a?l/ = a^b2. The same idea is expressed decimally by the number 513.24. The classification of Hartwig's Schema des Real Kataloges de Koniglichen Universitdtbitsbliothek zu Halle as. (p. 76) gives notations such as this KhQTFcBI4eII2. The Mathematical Bibliographic Index gives the number M*5hB.
[4] See the preceding studies of Daruty de Grandpr6 and Simoens.
54 Paul Otlet
But a condition sine qua non of the autonomy of the numerical elements is that they should always be characterized by a distinctive sign. This has been done for the first auxiliary indices that have been proposed; the 0 for indices of form, the parenthesis ( ) for geographical indices, and the : for the principal modifier [5].
One cannot, however, increase in an unlimited way the number of conventional signs. While it would be possible to conceive of them, they would make the classification unintelligible. Irremediable errors in writing and typography could be expected. But the greatest drawback is that, while the order in which the numerals 0 to 9 must be set down successively is universally known, it is necessary to establish an arbitrary order, which it is difficult to remember, for arranging signs.
The theoretical and practical aspects of the problem being thus clearly stated, let us indicate briefly some proposed solutions. First of all, use of specification by whole numbers has been considered. Any idea in the classification can be specified by another idea and the classification numbers corresponding to these ideas are separated by the sign [:] (sic). This leads us back to the fundamental formula A:B, or to take the concrete example cited above, 591.1 : 594 = Physiological Zoology: molluscs. This notation is the most explicit of all; each factor keeps its individuality and, there being no abbreviation, no explanatory conventions are needed [6].
Useful as a general means of establishing relations between all part of the classification, especially to indicate the relation of one subject with another (3:17 = relation between sociology and ethics; 7:17 = relation between art and ethics), whole number specification seems to be less useful for expressing divisions whose periodical recurrence is frequent For universal divisions such as time, place and form, we have proposed the geographical, historical and form indices, which we have discussed.
But other categories are also very general such as, for example, chronology and language. To indicate them concisely, uniformly and independently, Mr. Dewey has proposed to combine letters with numbers. The letters, really substitutes for arbitrary conventional signs, would be used to indicate the transition from one order of ideas to another, they would imply a well-known order. This is the scheme. Letters not used are reserved for future use. The letters proposed are those which would create the least confusion in writing:
0. Form Index (with all its subdivisions), 01, 02.
a.
b.
c. Time, Geological Periods. Divided like 551.7 stratigraphic geology, e.g. CI Archean, C2 Cambrian, etc.
d. Time, chronologic history. Divided thus:
1. B.C. 5. 1500-1599
2. 1-499 A.D. 501500-1509
20 1-49 51 1510-1519
21 50-99 52 1520-1529
[5] For what we have said on these three auxiliary indices and their use, see Bulletin, p. 90 and following. *• [6] See flu/tain, p. 91. u
Structure of Classification Numbers
55
22 100-149
23 150-199
24 200-249
25 250-299
26 300-349
27 350-399
28 400-449
29 450-499
3. 500-999 A.D. 30-39 like 20-29
4. 1000-1499 40-49 like 20-29
e.g. International
53 1530-1539
54 1540-1549
55 1550-1559
56 1560-1569
57 1570-1579
58 1580-1589
59 1590-1599
6. 1600-1699 60-69 like 50-59
7. 1700-1799 70-79 like 50-59
8. 1800-1899 80-89 like 50-59
politics in 1895 = 327 d 895.
f. Physical Place. Divided like 551.4 physical geology, f 1 Continents f 16
f 12 Islands f 17 Fresh Water
f 13 Mountains f 1 8 Rivers and Lakes
f 14 Caves f 19 Springs, Wells, etc.
f 15 Plains, Prairies, Steppes, Deserts e.g. fresh water molluscs, 594. f 17.
g. Oceans. Divided like 551.47, Oceans in geology. For example, g 1 Atlantic, North Sea, Baltic
g2 Mediterranean, Black Sea.
h. General Place. Divided according to the points of the compass.
1. Centre 6. South
2. North 7. South-West
3. North-East 8. West
4. East 9. North-West
5. South-East
e.g. Travel in the south of Europe 914 h 6.
j. Specialised place: political divisions. Divisions borrowed from 91 Geography and completed by the following table: e.g. Civil Architecture in France. 725.1 j44 instead of 725.1(44).
j 1 1 Arctic and Antarctic Regions j 12 Temperate Regions j 13 Tropical Regions j 14 Northern Hemisphere j 15 Southern Hemisphere j 16 Eastern Hemisphere j 17 Western Hemisphere
j 21 Europe & Asia } 22 Europe & Africa j 23 Europe & America j 24 Asia & Africa j 25 Asia & America j 26 Africa & America
56 Paul Otlet
1.
m.
n. Principal modifier. The addition to a classification number of another whole classification number.
p. Return to the subdivision of the principal number.
Examples:
|
598.2 |
Birds |
|
598.205 |
Birds: ornithological periodicals |
|
598.2 c 7 |
Birds in the Cretaceous period |
|
598.2 d 1 |
Birds Before Christ |
|
598.2 j 44 |
French Birds |
|
598.2 j 13 |
Birds in the Tropics |
|
598.2 n 579.1 |
Birds, skeletal organisation |
|
598.2 n 73 |
Birds in Sculpture |
|
598.2 n 821 |
Birds in English Poetry |
598.2 j 43d44 Birds in Germany in the 18th Century 442. j 73 p2 U. S. Constitutional Conventions
This notation would become a little clearer perhaps if the numbers with letters were themselves placed in parentheses. One would have 597(g3) instead of 597g3.
Mr. Dewey's solution, however, can be criticized because the mixture of numbers and letters removes from the classification its decimal and numerical character in which lies both its simplicity and its universality. Thus, we have attempted to achieve an identical result using numbers by proceeding in the following manner [7].
Various categories of auxiliary indices are borrowed from corresponding classification numbers and are placed between parentheses. They would be given an exponent corresponding to the main series of numbers. Let (. . .5) be the index for geologic time and ( . . .4) the language index, then 598.2 (75) would represent birds of the Cretacious period and 220.5 (9174) would represent Russian translations of the Bible, for 551.77 is the classification number of stratigraphic geology of the cretaceous period and 491.7 is the classification number for Russian philology.
In this proposal, the [:] (sic) would continue to indicate modification by a main classification number, and the parentheses given an exponent would be reserved to
[7] For the numerous divisions which constitute an enumeration rather than a classification into branches and sub-branches, it has been proposed to replace decimal division by division into lOOths. This division would actually give 80 new headings and not 100, for 01, 02, .... 09 and 20, 30, 40, . . . 90 would not be used so as to avoid confusion with indices of form expressing generalities. We would then have 546, 546.11, 546.12, 546.19, 546.21, etc. It is simpler to proceed thus than by underlining the numbers which are to be treated as whole numbers and not as decimal numbers, as in the following example: 546.1, 546.2, 546.9, 546,10, 546.11, 546. 12. Absolutely decimal notation for dates of the year can be formulated. The months would be indicated by 01, 02, 03, .... 11, 12 and the days, 01, 02, 09, 11, . . . ,31. The 7 March 1895 would be written (1895.03.07). This notation would be useful in History for subdivision by day of the month in certain troubled times, such as revolutionary periods and for the history of certain military campaigns. Then, it is true, the 0 is being given a sense other than that of the generalities; it has the sense of "nothing," but no confusion need be feared. Because of the parentheses and the figures which precede it, there should be no inconvenience in using it.
Structure of Classification Numbers 57
indicate only auxiliary divisions by time and place. The auxiliary geographic index is actually borrowed from the geography of each country.
9 1 .4 Geography of Europe, (4) Europe 91.54 Geography of India, (54) India
Now, the numbers 910 to 913 not being used to indicate the geography of any country, the symbols in parentheses, (1) (2), are available. Thus (1) and its divisions could be used for the chronological index suggested by Mr. Dewey thus:
(11) = B.C.
(17) = 18th Century12
(1854) = 1854
327 (15)= international politics in the 16th century.
The index (2) would indicate all the subdivisions of physical geography as given by Mr. Dewey:
595 (27) = Lake fish
Now, as we have said, because the historical divisions for each country have numbers symmetrical with those of geography, the auxiliary geographical indices could be extended by the historical divisions. Therefore, if we have
9 1 .44 Geography of France
(44) France (Auxiliary index)
9.44 History of France
9.44.05 History of France at the time of the Revolution
(44.05) France at the time of the Revolution (auxiliary index)
combinations like the following become quite clear:
595(27:44) French lake fish 595(44:27) French fish: Lakes.
In addition, direction would be indicated by universally understood letters of the compass: Geography of the North of France, 91 (44N).
Such a solution is still incomplete. It certainly provides a principal modifier for all the divisions which return only infrequently and also for some auxiliary indices which express uniformly the most generally used categories. It leaves unsolved the third problem: divisions which recur frequently in the same branch of the classification. Now, the classification of any branch of science nearly always gives rise to a double approach. The one involves concrete entities (such as minerals, plants, animals, peoples, languages); the other involves abstract and synthetic points of view (physiology, anatomy, embryology; lexicography, morphology, prosody, etc.) or put schematically:
58
Paul Otlet
|
591.1 |
591.2 |
591.3 |
|
|
59 ZOOLOGY |
PHYSIOLOGY |
PATHOLOGY |
BMBRYOLOGY. ETC |
|
a |
b |
C |
|
|
592 Invertebrates A |
|||
|
593 Protozoas B |
|||
|
594 Molluscs, etc. C |
For this double approach in which combinations are as frequently a: A as A:a, the modifier is sufficient. That is, 591.1:592 and 592:591.1 are perfectly intelligible. Nevertheless, the expression is a little long and it would be very desirable if the terminology of each of the sciences, especially if they have been the object of a convention generally accepted by scholars, could be formulated concisely [8]. Now, it is necessary to understand here that the point of view of the encyclopedist should be defended as well as that of the specialist. It is absolutely necessary in a Universal Bibliographic Repertory not to let the same number have several meanings. All confusion would appear to be avoided if, on the one hand, in order to distinguish them from those of time and place, the numbers expressing the classified terminology of each science were derived from .0 (sic) and placed between parentheses, and, if, on the other hand, all the parallel nomenclature indices derived from 0 (sic) were kept distinct from each other by prohibiting their use outside the science from which they are drawn and which provides the context for their interpretation.
Consequently, in Astronomy, for example, one would have the following nomenclature for heavenly bodies:
|
(01) |
The Sun |
(031) |
Mercury |
|
(02) |
The Moon |
(032) |
Venus |
|
(03) |
The Planets |
(09) |
The earth, etc. |
Then, 525 physical astronomy; 525(01) Physical Astronomy of the Sun; 525(031) Physical Astronomy of Mercury.
In pathology, for example, one would have, the terminology for diseases:
(01)
(012)
(02)
Diseases of the Circulatory System
Diseases of the Heart
Diseases of the Respiratory System
[8] In a great many sciences, such as chemistry, photography, electricity and anatomy, the nomenclature has been fixed by international congresses.
Structure of Classification Numbers 59
615.218 (012) Effects of phosphorous on the treatment of diseases of the heart [9]
When several kinds of terminology are used in the same science - as in medicine where there is a terminology for diseases, for medicines, for areas, or in chemistry where there is a nomenclature for elements and one for organic chemistry - they can all be derived from (0). For example:
(01) Nomenclature of the elements
(0111) hydrogen
(0112) chlorine
(02) Nomenclature of organic chemistry
(021) alcohols
(022) esters
Finally, when it is necessary to use terms outside of their respective sciences, the number of the science from which they have been taken can be placed in parenthesis as an exponent. Thus, for example, one would write: 368.42 (01261) = Conditions of health insurance for those with heart conditions. Nevertheless, in this case it is yet to be seen whether the simpler form of the principal modifier would be preferable: 368.42:616.12.
In summary, the decimal classification must constitute both a classification and a bibliographic notation. As a classification, it must present a framework in which ideas can be successively subordinated to each other in different ways, according to whether they are assigned a superior position or a subordinate one. As a bibliographic notation, it must become a veritable pasigraphy able to interpret by numerals grouped into factors having a separate and permanent meaning, all the nuances of ideologico-bibliographic analysis. These factors will delimit the principal idea by means of an auxiliary idea, this being sometimes another principal idea borrowed whole from some other branch of the classification, sometimes a bibliographical category in very general use, such as the auxiliary indices of time, place, language, etc., sometimes the very nomenclature of the sciences being dealt with.
The various combinations of these different factors will between them also dispense with the necessity of creating new classification numbers each time that it might be useful to classify the same bibliographical notices according to different points of view. Thus, the encyclopedic requirements of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory can be reconciled with the necessities of special bibliographies.
Bibliographic classification has problems which differ from science to science. These special needs have now been the object of a very great number of studies, knowledge of which will profit those who at this time are studying the developments
[9] M.M. Carus (Leipzig), Christie (Greenwich) and Baudouin (Paris) are agreed on the utility of these nomenclature indices drawn from each branch of the classification, but the notation that they propose does not take sufficient account of the view of the encyclopedist who must prohibit the attribution of the same notation to different ideas.
60 Paul Otlet
which must occur in the decimal classification. Here are the titles of some of these studies:13
Bibliographic - LARNED, Library Journal, 7:129 Art. - CUTTER, Library Journal, 7:168:72 and CARR, LL J., 9:172-75.
Geographie - CUTTER, L J. 9:115-16.
Bibliography, Larnard: J.N. Lamed, "Bibliography," Library J 'our tw/ 7(1882): 125-130
Art, Cutter and Cam C.A. Cutter, "Classification of the Book Arts" Library Journal 7 (1882): 168-172; HJ.
Carr, "Classification and Notation of the Book Arts," Library Journal 9 (1884): 172-175 Geography, Cutter: [Unsigned editorial by C.A. Cutter on J.N. Larned's scheme — see "Sociology, Lamed,"
below]. Library Journal 9 (1884): 115-1 16 Folklore, Cutter, Noyes, Richardson and Bless (sic) and Wheatley: C.A. Cutter, "The Place of Folklore in a
Classification: a Problem," Library Journal 9 (1884): 136; S.B.N. "Classifying Folk-Lore and
Shakespeariana [a paragraph in the section, "Communications"]," Library Journal 9(1884): 156; E.C.
Richardson, "Folk-Lore Again [a paragraph in the section, "Communication"]," Library Journal
9(1 884): 177; R. Bliss, [untitled paragraph added to the foregoing]; Henry B. Wheatley, "The Place of
Folk-Lore in a Classification," Library Journal 9(1 884): 188-1 89 History, Lomax: Benjamin Lomax, "On the Classification of History." Transactions and Proceedings of the
Third Annual Meeting of The Library Association of the United Kingdom, held at Edinburgh, October
1880. London: Chiswick Press, 1881. pp 67-68 History of France, Tedder following Monod: Henry R. Tedder, "The Bibliography and Classification of French
history ["the title of the work I have to speak of is Bibliographic de 1'Histoire de France: Catalogue
mcthodiquc et chronologique des sources et des ouvrages relatifs a l'histoire de France depuis les origincs
jusqu'en 1789 parG. Monod..."]," The Library 1(1889): 15-23 Law, Laue (sic): W.C. Lane, "Report on Classification, 1883-85," Library Journal 10(1885):257-262 Library Economy, Cutter: C.A. Cutter, "Classification of Library Economy and History," Library Journal
7(1882):271 Mathematics, Lord Lindsay: Lord Lindsay, "A Proposed Modification of the Amherst Classification in
Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics," Library Journal 4(1 879): 149- 152 Pure Mathematics, Rowell: J.C. Rowell, "Classification of Pure Mathematics," Library Journal 17(1892):447 Natural Sciences, Cutter and Trail: C.A. Cutter, "A Classification for the Natural Sciences," Library Journal
5(1880):163-166; James W.H. Trail, "The Classification of Books in the Natural Sciences," The Library
6(1884):13-18 Philosophy, Cutter and Lamed: "Two Classifications of Philosophy 1. C.A. Cutter, 1879," Library Journal
10(1885):79-80;"Two Classifications of Philosophy 2. J.A. Lamed, 1884," Library Journal 10(1885):80-
82 Recreative Arts, Cutter: C.A. Cutter, "Classification of the Recreative Arts and Athletic Arts," Library Journal
10(1885):6-7 Sociology, Lamed: J.N. Lamed, "A Nomenclature of Classification," Library Journal 9(1884):62-69 Theology, Richardson: E.C. Richardson, "Classification of Theology," Library Journal 8 (1883): 320-321 Zoology, Mann: B. Pickering Mann, "Zoological Subjects Partly Classified by the Dewey System," Library
Journal 5(1 880): 143- 144 Literature, Thomas: E.C. Thomas, "Classification of Literature," Library Chronicle 1(1885):181-183 Folktales, Cutter: C.A. Cutter, "Classification on the Shelves," Library Journal 6 (1881):^4-69 ^Bibliography of Shakespeare, Cutter, Noyes and Tedder: C.A. Cutter, "Arrangement and Notation of
Shakespeariana," Library Journal 9(1884): 137-139; S.B.N., "Classifying Folk-Lore and Shakespeariana
[a paragraph under the heading, "Communications"]," Library Journal 9(1884):156; Henry R. Tedder: A
Classification of Shakespeariana," Library Journal ll(1886):441-442 [outlines scheme] and 449
[summary of paper on the subject].
Structure of Classification Numbers 61
Also Consult14
Samuel H. Scuder, "The Arrangement of Books in the Libraries of Scientific Societies," Library Journal 12
(1887): 221-224. James Blake Bailey, "On Classification for Scientific and Medical Libraries," Library Chronicle 3 (1886): 109-
114. Borden, "Classification of Photographic Collections" Library Journal 17(1892): 195-197 Henry B. Wheatley, "Thoughts on the Cataloguing of Journals and Transactions," Transactions and
Proceedings of the Fourth and Fifth Annual Meetings of the Library Association of the United Kingdom,
London, September 1881 and Cambridge, September 1882. London: Chiswick Press, 1884. pp. 190-196. Henry R. Tedder, "Proposals for a Bibliography of National History [read at the Annual Meeting of the Library
Association, Plymouth 1885]," Library Chronicle 3 (1887): 185-194. F. Madan, "What to Aim at in Local Bibliography [read at the Annual Meeting of the Library Association,
Birmingham 1887]," Library Chronicle 4(1 887): 144- 148 F.B.F. Campbell, "An Introduction to the Theory of a State Paper Catalogue [read at the Annual Meeting of the
Library Association, Reading, 1890]," The Library 3(1891):126-143 Talbot B. Reed, "Use and Classification of a Typographical Library [Read at the Annual Meeting of the Library
Association, Nottingham 1891]," The Library 4(1892):33-44 W.M. Chase, "A General Engineering Classification and Index: Some Possibilities in the Extension and use, by
the Engineering Professions, of the Dewey Decimal System," Transactions of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers 14(1893):780-805
Editor's Notes
1. P. Otlet, "Sur la structure des nombres classificateurs," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 230-243. This article is followed by one unsigned on how to prepare papers and journals in such a way as to assist the bibliographer in his work, particularly by assigning decimal numbers: "Indexification d&imale: regies pratiques et modeles," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 244-249.
2. Victor Cams, "La Zoologie et la classification decimale," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 189-193.
3. Marcel Baudouin, "La Classification decimale et les sciences m6dicales," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 166-181.
4. Daruty de Grandpre\ "La Classification decimale et les bibliographies rggionales: bibliographic des iles africaines de l'ocean indien austral," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 205-221.
5. G. Simoens, "Quelque mots a propos de l'analyse bibliographique," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 222-229.
6. Otlet refers here to a note headed, "The International Conference of the Royal Society" and signed by Henry Armstrong, Chairman of the Organising Committee which was printed in IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 182-188. Armstrong sets forth matters that an international conference on an international catalogue for scientific literature would need to consider. He particularly addresses the problem of the decimal classification adopted "en bloc" by the IIB, suggesting it will need substantial modification if it is to serve the purpose of an international scientific catalogue. He provides a lengthy specimen of entries classified by the Decimal
62 Paul Otlet
Classification, suggests it has "very great" advantages, but indicates that "no attempt has been made as yet to bring the different schemes into harmony."
7. Otlet's first footnote refers to "Creation d'un Repertoire Bibliographique Universel: note preliminaire" translated above. A translation of the work he mentions in his Footnote 2,"Regles pour les ddveloppements a apporter a la Classification Decimale" follows as No. 4 in the present volume. Otlet misnumbers the footnotes in his text as 2 and 3 (rather than 1 and 2).
8. Teratology is "the study of monstrosities or abnormal formations in animals or plants." (Oxford English Dictionary).
9. Pasigraphy is "a name given to a system of writing proposed for universal use, with characters representing ideas instead of words, so as to be (like the ordinary numerals 1, 2, 3, etc.) intelligible to persons of all languages." (Oxford English Dictionary).
10. Otlet refers to his "Le Programme de llnstitut International de Bibliographic: objections and explications," IIB Bulletin 1 (1895-96): 73-100. In the passages indicated here he suggests that any classification number can be made yet more precise by the use of the form division indicated by 0, by a geographical subdivision indicated by a number in parentheses and drawn from the divisions of geography with the 91 suppressed, and by chronological subdivisions combined with those for geography. He does not in these pages discuss the use of the colon, : .
11. Otlet refers to, "Le Programme de l'lnstitut International de Bibliographic: objections and explications," where he says: "... a synthetic reading [of numbers] is singularly facilitated by the fact that the sense given to each component is permanent and absolute, identical in all of the combinations of which it becomes part . . . Bibliography finds in the numerical symbols of the decimal classification a notation assuredly as clear and as practical as the notation of algebra or chemistry."
12. The text gives(15) for the 18th Century. This presumably is a misprint and should read (17) as shown.
13. The first three references are in the sketchy form given by Otlet They are followed by full references that have been verified, each preceded by the subject and author form given by Otlet Otlet's citations in this section frequently contain mistakes of various kinds and these have been corrected.
14. The entries in this section have been identified, corrected, rearranged slightly and complete bibliographic details provided. The abbreviated citations to American and English sources (and the errors) must have made following up most of these references very difficult for European readers of the time.
4. RULES FOR DEVELOPING THE DECIMAL CLASSIFICATION1
Several parts of the Decimal Classification must be developed and enriched by new divisions. This work has begun under the direction of the International Office of Bibliography which has sought collaboration from several scholarly groups. The Office centralises and considers for approval all the proposals for modification that are submitted to it It is for these collaborators that we have assembled here a few notes and some advice on how to go about choosing new divisions so that the necessary consistency will be maintained between all parts of the classification. We ask that these observations be examined carefully.
New divisions should be created only in full knowledge of the situation. Thus it is important to re-read what has been published on the Decimal Classification in the Bulletin of the Institute and in Mr. Dewey's preface to the American edition. Any theoretical account being of little value without concrete examples, we refer to the developed tables of the Decimal Classification which have been published for Philosophy2 and Sociology.3 Their application may be checked in the various bibliographies that have already been published: Bibliographia sociologies Bibliographia philosophica, Bibliographia astronomica.4
Before the location for a new number is selected, the alphabetical index of the Decimal Classification should be checked to make sure that the subject has not already been assigned. The index ensures consistency between all parts of the classification.
Given the decisions of the Brussels conference, so that past uses of the classification and future uses can be kept rigorously consistent, no numbers of the Decimal Classification that already exist should be modified.
A bibliographical classification is different from a strictly scientific one in that its objective is quite practical: to arrange bibliographic entries in such a way that where they have been placed can always easily be found either by the person doing this work or by the person who must consult them. It follows that a bibliographic classification can depart from an exact scientific order without the principles of the classification being compromised. Moreover, because such a classification must be useful for a subject catalogue, one must be aware that to a certain extent it is not ideas themselves that have to be classified but entries for the books and journal articles that deal with these ideas. Consequently, while there are quite distinct subjects that ought to have their own place in
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a theoretical classification, a separate place in a bibliographical classification for them is pointless while there is nothing, or next to nothing, written about them. In other words, a bibliographic classification is not a pure classification of knowledge, but such a classification in relation to bibliographic entries [l]
In order to create an exhaustive classification, the following rules, appropriate to all classifications, should be kept in mind:
a) a complete enumeration of the objects to be classified;
b) an examination of the specific characteristics of these objects;
c) choice of one of these characteristics as the basis of classification; the subordination of other characteristics to this;
d) arrangement of objects in classes and subclasses by proceeding from the general to the specific and from the simple to the complex.
Difficulties arise because any object has many characteristics and consequently many possible classifications exist. In order to decide what characteristics to take as the basis for classification, the following observations should be kept in mind:
1. The objects of knowledge are both material entities belonging to the physical world, such as minerals, plants, scientific instruments, written languages, etc., etc. and intellectual entities, ideas, concepts. These two kinds of objects can be considered from two points of view. From the first point of view they can be envisaged as complete in themselves, as autonomous, as a totality, as a concrete whole. From the second point of view, they are envisaged in terms of their relations with other objects or as parts of an abstract entity.
While a classification always involves the abstract point of view and deals with objects in their relationships with each other, it is nevertheless necessary to be aware that the two points of view constantly interact For example: plants can be considered from the point of view of morphology, physiology, economics and geography. A country can be considered from the point of view of climate, geography, administration. Biology studies the same phenomena in all the orders of being: plants, animals, man.
To be complete, a classification should, therefore, enumerate both the objects and the points of view and choose as the basis of classification a sequence of one or the other as needs be.
2. The sciences, however, traditionally develop in a way that does not allow such clear distinctions. It is necessary to be aware of this in Bibliography, as in Education, because it is on this development that the professional specializations are based that so strongly influence the composition of the sciences themselves.
3. Because it is to be used for a Universal Bibliographic^ Repertory, the classification must be considered as a whole as well as in terms of its parts. If it were only a question of developing a classification for each separate branch of knowledge
[1] See what has been said on this subject in the Bulletin of the Institut International de Bibliographic, p. 86.
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without regard to the whole, then the tables for the classification of Chemistry, for example, would comprise not only pure chemistry but all the auxiliary and related sciences - applied chemistry, the general principles of physics, physiological chemistry, etc. On the contrary, the bibliographic repertory is unitary and its various parts support each other. As far as possible, therefore, to continue the example, there will be only one heading for chemical physiology to be used both by chemists and physiologists, a single photographic chemistry for photographers and chemists.
In the developments that the Decimal Classification must undergo, it is necessary to be aware of the following two ideas: to make the system as mnemonic as possible by using the same numbers or parts of numbers to express the same ideas; and to establish a symmetrical correspondence between the subdivisions of the various parts of the classification by taking the subdivisions of one part and making them serve as the divisions of another part.
As to the first point, there are numerous applications of it in the existing classification. Thus, history as a discipline is indexed as 9. The history of a discipline is indicated by the form number 09: the same number has the same meaning.
As to the second point, one can see how the developments of philology have followed those of literature. In botany and zoology, the divisions 581 and 591 are symmetric. In medicine, there is a nearly absolute agreement between Anatomy, Physiology, Hygiene and Pathology. For example:
61 Medicine
611 Anatomy
611.8 Anatomy of the Nervous System
612 Physiology
612.8 Physiology of the Nervous System
613 hygiene
613.8 hygiene of the Nervous S ystem
In relation to these ideas, it may be noted that:
1. Nearly all of today's disciplines develop according to the comparative method. This is notably true for Biology, Philology and Law. These disciplines, therefore, have fundamental divisions that are both common to each of them as a whole as well as to each of their component parts. Every language has, for example, grammar, syntax, lexicography, phonetics. This comparative approach must be preferred in the classification and the numbers of the classification must be arranged in such a way that the comparative subdivisions for points of view can be used, unmodified, as subdivisions for each concrete element An example is provided by the divisions for Philology (4), where 41 is Comparative Philology. All the divisions of 410 recur, with substantially the same numbers, in the divisions for the Philology of each individual language.
2. When developments that are symmetrical and in agreement have been created, it is necessary to consider which aspect of a subject is to be accepted as the
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principle focus for the subject in preference to other aspects which will be subordinated to it for development. For example: the internal administration of a country is divided according to the objects administered at 351.7. But there exists an international administration whose domain is growing ever larger. It is possible for Public Welfare, Unemployment and Vagrancy, Currency etc. to be the object of both national and international action. Therefore, all divisions of 351.7 have been repeated as divisions of 341.27 as objects of international administration. Several of these divisions, given the present state of international law, will not be useful and they will be left empty. On the other hand, divisions that do not exist already at 351.7 will not be created at 341.27 because the former number is treated as the focus for the subject Other numbers for comparison: 341.2, 347 and 351.7; 347.7 and 347; 351.77 and 614; 351.83 and 331.
3. A consequence of this rule of symmetry and parallelism is that it is important to make complete enumerations even if a particular number is not used. It is sufficient that a division should be necessary in certain places for it to become in theory generally valuable, even though it may not always be used. Thus the divisions of Physiological Zoology will be developed at the outset for all species without regard to whether this or that function is characteristic of them all or only some. To begin a special subdivision for each species would be to introduce needless complication. Similarly, there exists only one series of divisions for Paleontology (56) on the one hand, and Botany (58) and Zoology (59) on the other.
4. There should be a similar concern for the future. There are many divisions that are not useful for the bibliography of today's knowledge but which will become useful for tomorrow's. Rationally, to all intents and purposes such divisions can be said to exist already. It is necessary, therefore, to indicate what they are and to develop the classification in such a way that it will be able to accommodate them easily in the future.
Some specific rules follow:
A) When it is necessary to introduce a new subject in the classification, an available tenth is used.
B) When there is no longer an available division, one looks for an already classified heading to which the new subject is closely related. The existing heading is given a more general meaning that embraces the old and the new idea. Subsequendy, the decimal subdivisions are developed at this heading.
For example: The number 341.2 was assigned to international treaties. As there was no place for detailed studies about international administration, this classification number was given the collective meaning "states, territories, international relations, treaties, international administrations." The following divisions were created:
34 1 .2 1 States or Persons in International Law n^
34 1 .22 Territories or Things in International Law
34 1 .23 Essential and Reciprocal Rights and Duties of States
34 1 .24 Treaties which Supplement and Modify these Rights and Duties
In this way treaties properly speaking are no longer the only part of 341.2 (another example for comparison: 339 Pauperism).
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C) When a subject has more than 9 divisions and when it is not possible to bring two or more subjects together into a collective grouping, all the subjects that are left over are placed at the ninth division under the heading "Other" - see the Bulletin, p.89.6
D) When the divisions are numerous and constitute an enumeration and not a classification into branches and sub-branches, the decimal division into 10 can be abandoned in favour of division by lOOths. This division then yields 80 new numbers not 100, because 01, 02 to 09 and 20, 30, 40...90 must not be used in order to avoid confusion with the form numbers used for generalities - consult the development of the number 1 19 in the tables for philosophy in Bibliographica philosophical
E) If one decides that a subject would be better classified at another place, there is nothing to prevent it being relocated and