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death inspired the director of the Strasbourg geophysical institute to inquire
into their whereabouts. it took seven years for the Paris librarians to find the
catalog, still in the basement where it had been placed in 1942. An inven-
tory was finally published in 1984.
48
)
As historians of information science note, it is difficult to appreciate in
the internet age the enthusiasm with which the concept of the card catalog
was greeted circa 1900. Advocates of the card catalog saw it as the means
of liberating information from its conines in topics and organizing it for
scholarly and public use. “Cards of a uniform size, on which standardized
data were transcribed, housed physically in card drawers and related fur-
niture, and organized conceptually by classification schemes of various
kinds, in effect epitomized a new 'modernist' technology.”
49
in seismology,
the card catalog promised a new path to the nineteenth-century ideal of
complete knowledge, guided by the internationalist values of efficiency and
commensurability. it was the quintessential modernist solution to the glob-
alization of knowledge.
The State of the Planet
Montessus and Forel urged the iSA not to neglect its responsibility for “uni-
versal” seismic description. Back in 1899, gerland had assured his audience
at the international geographical Congress that the iSA would pursue “the
publication of a chronicle, which would extend over a certain period [and
include] a bibliography.”
50
A catalog had also been discussed at the Stras-
bourg conference of 1901. Yet “inexplicably, it is never mentioned anywhere
in a precise manner,” as Forel pointed out at the 1907 meeting of the iSA.
51
in 1905, gerland's Central Bureau of the iSA in Strasbourg had published
the first volume of a putatively global catalog, two years after the events it
chronicled. Forel evidently hoped to give the iSA a degree of control over fu-
ture volumes. he was soon appointed to a commission to oversee their pro-
duction. the iSA's catalog would be “more complete” than those of Fuchs,
Perrey, and Mallet, and based on “more extensive information”; they would
“be perfected from year to year, [and] become the fundamental repertory of
the entire seismological science of the future.”
52
the catalog, in short, was
to be a distinctly modern object.
Forel sought a wide audience for the catalog, as for his limnological stud-
ies. this included geographers who wished to compare regions of stronger
or weaker seismicity, or to trace the rise and fall of seismicity in a region
over time; geologists interested in “the points and the lines of greatest fragil-
ity on the globe”; physicists and astronomers studying the nature of seismic
