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Library and Information Society

Notes 1928 and 1929 under the presidency of Alan Pollard, an Englishman who with S.C.Bradford had
created the British Society for International Bibliography in 1927 to be what Bradford called a
“daughter society” of the IIB. At the 1928 meeting of the Institute Duyvis was elected third Secretary-
General and, an energetic young man of 34 compared to Otlet who was now 60 and La Fontaine
who was 74, became the dominant figure in the Institute.
Henceforth the Belgians and the centre in Brussels, a very imperfect, ill-supported institutional
nucleus of international services and collections, had little importance in the IIB’s work. It continued
to exist and to be the main focus of Otlet’s activities. The OIB after all was still a legally constituted,
semi-official governmental entity only dissolved in 1980 when its assets were transferred to the
Bibliothèque Royale. The collections of the Palais Mondial or Mundaneum on the other hand were
absorbed into the Centre de Lecture publique de la Communaute française centred in Liège only in
1983.
After 1931, then, the IIB began to function much more systematically and regularly as any other
international organisation. Its work was now mainly related to its annual conferences, the publication
of a bulletin (Documentatio Universalis 1930-32, edited in Brussels, IID Communicationes 1933-39
and then FID Communicationes following the Institute’s name changes, edited in the Hague), and
the revision of the full French edition of the UDC. This was much delayed. While printing actually
began in 1926, the work was not finished until 1932. Complete German and English editions were
also begun at this time under the aegis of the Deutscher Normanausschuss in the first instance and
the British Society for International Bibliography and ASLIB in the second (after the Second World
War this was taken over by the British Standards Institution).
In the period of the 1930’s the IID became very much concerned with issues of documentary
reproduction, especially using microfilm. While pioneering studies and the development of prototype
machines go back to the work in 1906 and later of Otlet and Robert Goldschmidt, a new widespread
international interest in improving film, film processing, cameras, and reading machines made the
whole area a volatile and exciting one with potentially profound implications for information
services.
In 1931 the Institute’s name was changed after debate sparked by a report by Jean Gerard on the
recently established Union française des Organismes de Documentation. In 1937 Gerard planned in
Paris a vast conference on the international organisation of documentation. The conference was
grandiosely named the Congrès Mondial de Documentation Universel. Its major outcome was to
confirm the viability of the IID as the key international body in its field. The IID now changed its
name again in order to emphasise that it functioned as an international federation of national
organisations and international associations. It seemed that it had been able to satisfy the international
community that it could conform to the various organisational and programmatic desiderata that
had emerged after several years of soul-searching and conflict within the IID itself and of more
broadly based debate with Gerard, the Paris Institute and others outside it.
La Fontaine died in 1943, Otlet in 1944. It was therefore left to Donker Duyvis to revive the FID after
the War. The first post-war conference of FID was held in Paris in 1946 with strong international
representation. The Englishman, Charles leMaistre, was nominated as President to replace J.Alingh
Prins, Donker Duyvis’s superior in the dutch Patent Office, who had been in office since 1931. A
process for revision of FID’s statutes was introduced. The work of the organisation was formalised
in a variety of committees whose activities date back for the most part to the late 1930’s. A Commission
de Redaction de la Periodique was also set up to oversee the publication of the FID’s journal now
re-titled Revue de la Documentation/Review of Documentation.
Most important of all was the close relations that were at once set up with UNESCO. E.J. Carter, the
Head of the Libraries Section, encouraged FID to apply for grants for various tasks. He also
encouraged FID and IFLA to consider their relationship and possible avenues of cooperation. The
post-war history of FID has yet to be written. When it is it will be in part a study of the vicissitudes

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