The invitation to give an opening address at this International Conference on Scientific Information reached me at a time when I happened to be reading a description of the greatest bore in English literature, a description that appears appropriately in a book written jointly by a Scotsman and an American, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne. It is said of Uncle Joseph Finsbury that “A taste for general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless perhaps it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many years had passed over his head before he would have travelled 30 miles to address an infant school.” Tonight I have travelled more than 30 miles, and visual observation suggests that I am not addressing an infant school. If you will but change “general information” into “scientific information” you will see what a shocking coincidence this was and how I had to search my mind to find justification for my presence before you tonight. The simplest explanation is that I am at the moment the Senior Secretary of the Royal Society of London, and the Royal Society held almost exactly 10 years ago the first Conference of international status devoted solely to the subject of Scientific Information. The Conference was not in the strict sense international since it arose directly from the deliberations two years previously of a meeting of Scientists of the British Commonwealth, what we then had the temerity to call the British Empire Scientific Conference. The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference therefore was attended by representatives from all the Dominions, and, through a very fortunate chance, or perhaps as a result of a bland disregard of the Declaration of Independence or, and this is the more likely course, through the wisdom and foresight of my predecessors, one of whom, Sir Alfred Egerton, is in this room tonight, it included a representative from the Library of Congress, it included Dr. Murray Luck and it included no less a person than one Dr. Detlev W.Bronk, then