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Verticality, and related figures such as the tower, stack, or mountain, are commonly used as spatial metaphors to express the hierarchy that we apply to information and knowledge. But these metaphors that transform the vertical dimension of knowledge into words are also translated into library architecture. Different libraries include, or have been built in the form of, a tower. In these cases, verticality as a spatial metaphor is folded back onto the spatial and architectural field where it originated. Library towers transform verticality as a concept that conveys relations in knowledge into architectural language. The translation of verticality as a dimension of knowledge into architecture thus forms a strange double bind between space and knowledge. This article analyzes how libraries have expressed the vertical dimension of knowledge in their architecture and identifies different approaches that make the vertical dimension of knowledge architecturally present. The library of Ghent University (Belgium), by Henry van de Velde, includes a storehouse of books that has been completely accommodated in a tower. The architecture of the French National Library, by Dominique Perrault, plays with the metaphor of the tower in a semantic manner. Other libraries, such as the "Book Mountain" by MVRDV in Spijkenisse, exploit the book stack architecturally; and some libraries, such as The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, by Neutelings Riedijk architects, do not build up but down, in the underground, to house their collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1983 Boyd Rayward described the early diffusion abroad of the Dewey Decimal Classification (and indirectly of the Universal Decimal Classification) in Australia, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Russia. Here, I discuss the enormous interest in the decimal system in the Netherlands that went far beyond its original role for the classification of bibliographic knowledge. I will present Johan Zaalberg (1858-1934) and Ernst Hijmans (1890-1987) as two advocates for the use of the decimal system in the administration of public organizations and private companies and its role in the development of scientific management in the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]