He was a man of immensely strong faith. A faith that balanced well with his reason.
Malcolm Guite on Dr. Johnson
Tag: libraries
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From Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Two solid paragraphs from Gordon S. Wood on Thomas Jefferson’s endless curiosity.
He was interested in more things and knew about more things than any other American. When he was abroad he traveled to more varied places in Europe than Adam’s ever did, and kept a detailed record of all that he had seen, especially of the many vineyards he visited.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10Not sure how one measures that Jefferson was interested in more things, and knew more things than any other American, but I trust Mr. Wood here. Also, Jefferson’s record keeping is legendary.
He amassed nearly seven thousand books and consulted them constantly; he wanted both his library and his mind to embrace virtually all of human knowledge, and he came as close to that embrace as an eighteenth century American could. Every aspect of natural history and science fascinated him.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 10, 11It wasn’t enough that Thomas Jefferson owned seven thousand books. He consulted them regularly.
He knew about flowers, plants, birds, and animals, and he had a passion for all facets of agriculture. He had a fascination for meteorology, archaeology, and the origins of the American Indians. He loved mathematics and sought to apply mathematical principles to almost everything, from coinage and weights and measures to the frequency of rebellions and the length of people’s lives. He was an inveterate tinkerer and inventor and was constantly thinking of newer and better ways of doing things, whether it was plowing, the copying of handwriting, or measuring distances.
Wood, Gordon S. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. New York: Penguin Press, 2017. pg. 11It’s hard to think of any modern, public person, with Jefferson’s insatiable appetite for “all of human knowledge”.
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Belle Epoque: Notes and thoughts on chapter 3
Information networks need human networks to exist. Paul Otlet understood this. Otlet’s wisely partnered with skilled networker Henri La Fontaine. La Fontaine participated in the social clubs of the day. A Freemason, he founded the Belgian League for the rights of women, and earned membership into the Belgian Senate. He passed his networking knowledge on to Otlet:
Having thus acquired for their organization an air of governmental authority, La Fontaine also helped Otlet master the arts of politicking and persuasion. Through a combination of determination, guile, and relentless personal networking, the two men began to insinuate themselves into the center of a global dialogue about the future of books and libraries: convening congresses, issuing bulletins, and promoting their project at every available opportunity.
Cataloging the World, Alex Wright. pg 74The pair successfully wooed King Leopold II into endorsing their Office of International Bibliography. They pitched him on the idea of being a stakeholder of a global international project.
“In taking this initiative,” Interior Minister François Schollaert wrote to the king at Otlet and La Fontaine’s behest, “you can establish in your country the principal organ of intellectual life.” For the imperially minded monarch, the prospect of serving as royal patron to a universal library would likely have held much the same appeal as it did to the emperors of Sumeria, China, and Alexandria
Cataloging the World, Alex Wright. pg 73Beginning with each other, Otlet and La Fontaine built a vast network of support for their universal library. Without constructing a human network, their information network would never exist.
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An “irrepressible reformer” (as his biographer, Wayne A. Wiegand, calls him), Dewey devoted most of his life to pressing for social change: railing against alcohol and tobacco, promoting the metric system, and even agitating to simplify English spelling (even going so far as to change the spelling of his own name to the phonetically correct Melvil Dui). Dewey invented his Decimal Classification while still an undergraduate at Amherst College, drawing on the earlier work of important library thinkers like Cutter and William T. Harris, whose cataloging scheme for the St. Louis Library had drawn directly on the concept of Francis Bacon and his division of all learning into three high-level categories: history, poetry, and philosophy.
Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, Alex Wright. Chapter 1 The Libraries of Babel, pg 37.Could there have been a librarians version of the PayPal mafia?
Frederick Winslow Taylor inspired Melvil Dewey, who collaborated with Charles Cutter, and both of them were inspired by Francis Bacon’s division of learning.
Dewey didn’t stop after the success of the Dewey Decimal System. He later founded the Library Bureau, the 18th century version of Staples. Which is still in business today!
Floodlights and Goalposts 