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Library and Information Society

Notes Bibliography(OIB), an institutional headquarters for the Institute, was set up as a quasi-official
agency of the Belgian government. Its task was to develop what was called the Repertoire
Bibliographique Universel, a universal bibliography on cards arranged in the classified subject order
of the Decimal Classification. Dewey gave Otlet and LaFontaine permission to translate and expand
the classification as necessary for bibliographic purposes and agreed to become Vice President of
the Institute.
There followed an extraordinary series of developments in the period before the First World War.
The Universal Bibliographic Repertory, what today is called a database, grew to more than 11 million
entries. An international search service, operated through the mails, was set up and led to some
analysis of search strategies and the problem of pricing. By 1912 aver 1500 requests for information
were being received a year. In 1906 a pictorial database was created. Called the Repertoire
Iconographique Universel it was intended to be a pictorial counterpart to the bibliographic database
and was organised according to the same principles. In 1907 a Repertoire Encyclopedique des
Dossiers was developed. In this, brochures, pamphlets,periodical and newspaper articles along with
other kinds of documents were assembled to give a substantive,”encyclopedic” dimension to the
repertory.
What became known as the Universal Decimal Classification (or the Brussels Expansion of Dewey),
a software package used for subject access to the bibliographic and other data bases set up at the
OIB, was elaborated by the wide-ranging international collaboration of a large group of scholars,
some of them Nobel Prize winners. A procedure for number compounding using signs of association
and auxiliary schedules was developed, making the UDC the first great faceted classification. Various
parts of the classification were issued between 1896 and the appearance of the first complete edition.
This was a huge volume of over 2000 pages published in the period 1904 to 1907.
The Bulletin of the Institute was issued from 1895. It appeared steadily until 1911, and, after a
hiatus, again in 1914. It is a major journal in which important studies of the Decimal Classification,
the theory of what Otlet began to call “Documentation”, the international statistics of printing, and
the bibliographic applications of microphotography, among a wide range of other matters of
bibliographical importance, were reported. Conference of the Institute were held in 1897, 1900,
1908 and 1910. Papers given at these meetings and the proceedings were usually published in the
Bulletin, as well as being issued separately in substantial volumes in the case of the 1908 and 1910
conferences. The Office of Bibliography also embarked on an ambitious programme of bibliographical
publishing.
Very early the Institute realised the importance of having national offices or branches in other
countries. The first such sections, and the only ones effectively until after the War, were the Bureau
Bibliographique de Paris and the Concilium Bibliographicum in Zurich. The latter, directed by an
American, Herbert Haviland Field, was extremely important in developing some of the science
divisions of the UDC and in publishing important periodical scientific bibliographies in such a way
that they could be incorporated directly into the RBU. After 1905 a series of major expansions occurred
in the OIB which gradually transformed it into a nucleus of a centre of general internationalism.
First among the developments was the creation of an Office Central des Associations Internationales
and the mounting in collaboration with the Societe belge de Sociologie of a extensive survey of
international organisation in general.
The following year a Bibliotheque Collective des Associations et Institutions Scientifiques et
Corportives was founded. When the library was officially opened about eighteen months later, the
number of participating bodies, mostly international associations with their headquarters in Brussels,
had grown from six to twenty-five. By 1914 the number was 62. In 1906 the first of a number of
specialised information services was introduced. This was the Office international de Documentation
technique. It was followed in 1907 by similar offices for hunting, fisheries, and polar regions and
one for aeronautics in 1908. Active only for a few years and then only in a token way, these offices
represented an attempt to realise practically new forms of information service the desirability of
which Otlet and his colleagues had become theoretically convinced.

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