From Science Information's Concilium Bibliographicum of the 1890s to Espionage...

This talk describes a forthcoming book on the history of an 1890s attempt to create and sustain a world-wide, random-access, cumulative, and updatable data-base of all scientific information indexed in an "international language", a language that helped to develop the UDC. The Zurich Concilium's history was deep and long. It's fate was tied to the birth of the American research university, the wealth and values of a liberal American Quaker family, the struggles between pragmatic and theoretical information specialists, the internationalist movements (including the work of Paul Otlet), the rise of America's eastern liberal elite and its institutions, the nationalist urge in American science information, and, much, much more,--including the modern art movement. The history of the Concilium's founder, and his family, are also linked to: the ambitions of the American intelligence agencies in World Wars I and II; Soviet espionage in the 1930s and 1940s; the brutal purges in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1940s and 1950s; and, the shaping the cold war's science information systems.