Intellectual Exchange and the New Information Order of the Interwar Years: The British Society for International Bibliography, 1927-1937

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2013 (“Essays in Honor of W. Boyd Rayward: Part I,” edited by Alistair Black and Charles van den Heuvel), pp. 465–477. © 2014 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Abstract This article examines how the internationalism of the interwar years interacted with a growing concern for documentation and knowledge organization. To this end, it examines the work of the British Society for International Biography. The organization sought close links with British institutions but had pronounced transnational features: it championed the Universal Decimal Classification, collaborated with the International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels, and interacted with the League of Nations’ bodies for intellectual cooperation. As a whole, the article shows how different actors sought to shape a new information order, yet it also traces the obstacles that they encountered.