THE WORK OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS FOR DOCUMENTATION
| Pages | 117-131 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026243 |
| Published date | 01 March 1957 |
| Date | 01 March 1957 |
| Author | F.S. NORTHEDGE |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Journal of
DOCUMENTATION
Volume 13
SEPTEMBER
1957 Number 3
THE WORK OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
FOR DOCUMENTATION
by F. S. NORTHEDGE
London School of
Economics
BETWEEN the two wars the League of Nations through its Intellectual Co-
operation Organization sought to improve intellectual relations, as they were
then called, between the countries of the world. This sphere of activity lacked
any precise definition, but in practice the Organization covered much the
same ground that its successor, the United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization, does today. The structure of the League body,
however, was strikingly different from that of
Unesco,
and in some respects
the same is true of the methods by which it worked. But this does not lessen
the importance of taking into account the experience of this much-neglected
body (this article being more concerned with the field of documentation) for
understanding how Unesco came to be and perhaps for evaluating its work.
When advocates of an international agency for bringing together intel-
lectual workers in the different countries set to work at the end of the First
World War, they could point to some foundations which already existed.
There was, for instance, the movement for an international educational
agency dating from the early nineteenth century. A conference was to have
been held at The Hague in 1914 to create an inter-governmental office of
education, but this idea was not revived after the war and the International
Bureau of Education was a non-official organ when founded in
1925.
Then
there were the diplomatic agreements of the late nineteenth century for faci-
litating international intellectual exchanges and for protecting intellectual
property. One of the most important of these was the Berne Copyright
Convention of
1886,
which created the Berne Bureau, itself a pioneer centre
for questions of common concern to the intellectual world. The same year,
1886,
also
saw the
Brussels
Convention providing for the exemption of certain
categories of books and documents from postal charges between signatory
states.
The hope in 1919 was that a League organ for intellectual relations,
besides helping to re-establish contacts between universities and learned insti-
tutions which the war had disrupted, would be in a position to unite these
efforts within a common framework and perhaps secure for them the goodwill
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