Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke

Abstract

Reviewed by: Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss by Colin B. Burke Jon Agar (bio) Information and Intrigue: From Index Cards to Dewey Decimals to Alger Hiss. By Colin B. Burke. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 382. $45. In a world dominated by Google Inc., with its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” we sometimes forget how difficult it once was to find out where to find knowledge. The Library of Alexandria was too big to simply browse, and so possessed a catalog to help readers locate the scroll they wanted. Catalogs have been a help ever since. But the growth of science in the nineteenth century, specifically the growth of scientific journals, presented a more pressing problem: how would scientists find the freshly published articles that they needed to read? Mere knowledge of the title of a journal was inadequate, because it was the specific and specialist content that was important. Science as a coherent, international endeavor depended on the solution to such problems. In the 1890s, Herbert Haviland Field, an American son of a Quaker family, offered a solution. His Concilium Bibliographicum was an immense and expensive undertaking. Field’s proposal, which he sold as a service to libraries, was to summarize the contents of scientific papers on cards, which would be classified according to a Dewey numerical identifier. Every few months a subscribing library would receive a new, and increasingly large, batch of cards. By consulting this distributed catalog, scientists could locate the new journal articles of interest to them. The Concilium was one of a number of responses to late-nineteenth-century scientific information overload. Other, to greater or lesser extent rival, projects were pursued by the Royal Society of London, which attempted to track and list new journals, and in Belgium by Paul Otlet with his equally ambitious informational schemes. These projects are part of a long history of information, an area which is now receiving considerable attention from historians. Colin B. Burke, a historian who has worked on both secret and open sides of the intelligence curtain, relates the curious family tale of the Fields. Herbert was a rich, idealistic internationalist. His Concilium would, in Burke’s account of Field’s interests and motivations, “erase national intellectual boundaries and equalize access to scientific discoveries” (p. 41). Field established the Concilium’s headquarters in Switzerland, home of a certain spirit of neutral internationalism and financial support. Nevertheless, the project was always short of cash. Burke describes in considerable detail the ebbs and flows of family feuds and alliances and the attempts by Field to interest even larger philanthropic concerns, notably the Rockefeller Foundation, in supporting his internationalist service. The detail is sometimes rather overwhelming, as the project advances a few steps and then falters, over several decades. [End Page 1019] And then Herbert Field suddenly died, “one of the last victims of an international catastrophe, the pandemic influenza” that followed the First World War. Herbert’s wife Nina now held the reins, and benefited from a generous settlement offered by the Rockefeller Foundation. But it was not enough to save the Concilium, which, like Otlet’s similarly grand and idealist inter-nationalist Mundaneum, decayed away in an increasingly fraught and riven international context. The final quarter of Information and Intrigue concerns Herbert and Nina’s sons and daughters. Noel Field became a minor Soviet spy. In the late 1940s sons Hermann and Noel, Noel’s wife Herta, and Herta and Noel’s adopted daughter Erica, “disappeared after traveling to Central and Eastern Europe” (p. 302). They were imprisoned and tortured (and later released) as suspected American spies despite being, certainly in Noel’s case, Soviet agents. This spying angle has clearly intrigued Burke. There is a tantalizing hint, in the account he gives of the information challenges encountered by the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA which “soon built files larger than Paul Otlet’s or the Concilium’s” (p. 291), of a genuine and deep intersection of librarian and security service worlds. But the almost contingent connection of Herbert and Noel Field is too narrow...