The third International Conference on a Catalogue of Scientific Literature was held in London on June 12th and 13th. It will be remembered by those who are interested in the organization of science that a conference on this subject was called by the Royal Society in 1896 at which it was proposed to undertake by international coöperation a catalogue of contributions to science. Certain details were arranged and others were left to a committee of the Royal Society. Under the auspices of this committee schedules of classification were drawn up and estimates of the cost secured. A second conference was held in 1898, and after various changes in the plans for the catalogue it was at the recent Conference definitely decided to proceed with its publication. It is estimated that the cost will be covered by the sale of three hundred sets, and different governments or national agencies have made themselves responsible for a certain number of sets, Germany and Great Britain for example, subscribing for forty-five sets, each costing £17. The Catalogue will be published in seventeen volumes devoted to as many sciences, and will be both an author’s and a subject index. The collection of material is to commence from January 1, 1901. While all scientific men welcome improvements in cataloguing scientific literature, the arrangements proposed by the Royal Society and by the different conferences have met with some criticism. The serious mistake has been made of entirely ignoring the catalogues and bibliographies already existing for most of the sciences, and it is not certain that the elaborate and expensive machinery proposed will be as useful as some plan would have been for unifying the existing agencies. Still in the end there must be some international and uniform method for cataloguing scientific literature, and it is to be hoped that our Government will do its share toward supporting the present undertaking.
[Transcribers’ Notes]
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.
Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.
Page [342]: “millenium” was printed that way.
Page [366]: “to smear the statues of Jupiter” was misprinted as “statutes”.
Page [387]: “we have meet with a difficulty” was printed that way.
Page [387]: “cm.” originally was printed as “c. m.”