These translations of a selection of Paul Otlet's writings have been a long time in preparation. Now put down, now taken up again over a period of ten years or so in Chicago, London andSydney, theyare dispatched at last to Amsterdam with relief. They follow an earlier biographical and institutional study of Otlet and the International Institute of Bibliography (now FID, the International Federation for Information and Documentation). 1 The publication of that work left me with a troubled sense of more that needed to be done, of an obligation incurred but not yet discharged. 2 It has always seemed to me that, though not entirely neglected, Otlet's contributions to our understanding of bibliography, documentation and what is now called information storage and retrieval, sometimes information science, and the technical and institutional arrangements needed to maximise their social utility, have not had the attention in the English-speaking world that is their due. It is my hope that the availability of this selection of papers in English, both in themselves and because of the attention that the act of publication can engender, will encourage a renewal of interest in