"Recording information in separate chunks or units according to the "monographic principle," could be applied to bibliographical references on cards and substantive information on standardized separate sheets. The idea was to "detach what the book amalgamates, to reduce all that is complex to its elements and to devote a page to each. Pages here are leaves or cards according to the format adopted."(Otlet, 1918, p. 149). After all, at one level a book was simply a "single continuous line which has initially been cut to the length of a page and then cut again to the size of a justified line." Otlet suggested that the "repertories" -- in modern terminology, the databases -- that he and his colleagues were developing provided "a practical means of physically dividing the book according to the intellectual division of ideas" and obviating authorial peculiarities that obscured what was new and important in what was being presented."

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