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Unit 5: Types of Library and their Function in Indian Context

In 1909 Otlet and La Fontaine co-edited with Alfred Fried the Annuaire de la Vie interntionale. This Notes
directory had been started by Fried in 1904. It was now enormously expanded as a result of the
survey mentioned above. Above all was the 1910 World Congress of International Associations at
which the Union of International Associations was founded. Another even larger and more grand
congress of the international associations was held in 1913 and planning for a third in 1915 was
interrupted by the War. When the Union of International Associations, which essentially became
defunct in 1924, was revived after the Second World War one of its major functions was to continue
the long suspended publication of the Annuaire, now called the Yearbook of International
Associations
At the 1910 congress a resolution had been passed that the Belgian government sponsor the creation
of an international museum to hold and develop as its collections exhibits of the associations and
countries at the Brussels World Fair then underway. The government made part of the Palais du
Cinquantenaire available for the purpose. This became the base of what was soon called the Palais
Mondial, a vast centre of internationalism. It was planned eventually to centralise in it the
bibliographical services of the OIB, the International Library, the International Museum, secretarial
and publishing services for the associations, and, ultimately, if Otlet and La Fontaine’s hopes were
realised, an International University.
All of these services and the organisational arrangements needed for them were expressions of
Otlet’s gradually widening and deepening ideas about the nature of what he called “documentation”.
He was convinced that if knowledge were to be effectively disseminated and used new kinds or
international agencies were needed, new kinds of highly standardised information handling methods
had to be adopted and international agreements had to be forged to create a worldwide system of
documentary communication. During the War, the “Institutes” of the Palais Mondial were kept
open by the Secretary, Louis Masure, though in the nature of things there was not much activity.
Otlet spent the war years in neutral Europe, La Fontaine in the United States. After the War all of
the enterprises associated with the Office and Institute of Bibliography were brought together as
planned in the left wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire with the other collections of the Palais
Mondial. In 1920 a Quinzaine International (or International Fortnight) was held (others were held
in 1921, 1922, and 1924). Conferences of the IIB and UIA took place along with the first session of
what was rather grandiosely referred to as an International University, though it was really no
more than a high-powered summer school. Patronage of the recently founded League of Nations
was requested for the venture but was not forthcoming.
At first apparently successfully making the transition from the nineteenth century and the War, the
Palais Mondial soon found itself in trouble. Support from the League of Nations and, after 1922, its
Institute for International Cooperation, much desired, was withheld. An unstable and politically
and financially troubled Belgian government also gradually withdrew its support. In 1922 it resumed
occupancy of the parts of the Palais du Cinquantenaire it had made available for the Palais Mondial
for a commercial exhibition. It did this again in 1924. In 1934 it effectively closed the Palais Mondial
completely, only to admit this was an error just before the Second World War broke out, whereupon
new locations were provided by the Ville de Bruxelles.
It was now clear to the supporters of the IIB that something had to be done to rescue it from the
imbroglio of the Palais Mondial. In 1921 a young Dutchman, Frits Donker Duyvis, had begun to
work with the Belgians on a revision of the UDC, which had not been properly re-examined since
the first complete edition in 1907. In many areas, but especially the scientific and technical ones, it
was by now badly out of date. Duyvis became secretary of an International Committee for the
Decimal Classification to spearhead this revision. In 1924, at a meeting in the Hague chaired by La
Fontaine but dominated by Duyvis and his Dutch colleagues, the statutes of the IIB were revised to
emphasise national organisations as the effective members of the institute and to de-emphasise the
centralised services associated with the bibliographic repertory (unavailable for consultation in
Brussels and unrealistically conceived) in the Institute’s work. These reforms were followed up in

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