In 1949 appeared under the title Bibliographie linguistique des années 1939-1947 – volume I. Volume II appeared in 1950. The next volume, under the title Bibliographie linguistique de l’année 1948 et complément des années 1939-1947, appeared in 1951 and the year 2001 saw the appearance, with a change of language but not really of title, of the Linguistic bibliography for the year 1997 and supplements for previous years.

The title of the first volume, cited above, is followed by a statement of responsability, a statement we still find in the fiftieth volume: "Publiée par le Comité international permanent de linguistes". This Permanent International Committee of Linguists (or CIPL) plays an important role in the history of the Bibliographie linguistique (BL). It was not until the 18th of November 1946 that the Committee first met after the war, now under the presidency of the Norwegian scholar Alf Sommerfelt. This Paris meeting took the decision to compile a "linguistic bibliography of the war-years", as the preface to the first volume states.

The organization of the work was entrusted to the office of CIPL, but from the beginning it was clear that in the given circumstances, with great parts of Europe, Asia and Africa still recovering from the war, it would be impossible for one person, or even a group of persons on one location, to compile such a bibliography. Prof. Mohrmann therefore set out to find linguists in as many countries as possible to compile the bibliography of their respective countries. The task of editing and classifying the collected data would then be performed by the office, i.e. prof. Mohrmann. A classification scheme for the new bibliography was drawn up by the French linguist Jean Gagnepain. In a list of "Indications pour la bibliographie linguistique" Mohrmann suggested that for lay-out and interpunction of the bibliographic descriptions the rules of the Année philologique should be followed. In fact, the whole set-up of the new linguistic bibliography reminds one very much of the Année philologique, which had started under the title Dix années de bibliographie classique, covering the years 1914-1924; that bibliography, too, was specificly meant to cover the war years, then of the First World War.

In order to appreciate the full extent of the undertaking, we have to bear in mind that in those days the good old mail was in fact the only means of international communication; and in these first post-war years it was often quite slow and unreliable. As late as 1949 a package from Copenhagen was lost in the mail for such a long time that the Danish contributor almost had started to do the work over again, when it finally was delivered at the Nijmegen office.

After preparatory work in 1947, the first contributions started to arrive in 1948. Apparently the task of editing and classifying soon became too heavy for prof. Mohrmann alone; already in the beginning of 1949 part of this work was entrusted to Jan Beylsmit, who would be connected with the BL for many years to come. Although much correspondence from these years has been preserved in the CIPL archive, it cannot be determined to what extent the first volumes were the result of Beylsmit’s work. He had to submit his work to prof. Mohrmann for supervision, that much is clear; on the other hand, already at that stage he made some propositions for changes in the classification scheme.

In the meantime, negotiations had started with the newly founded UNESCO, as a result of which in December 1948 a subvention was promised of $1000.- per volume. This made it possible to have the bibliography printed and towards the end of 1949 the first volume was published by the Utrecht publishing house Spectrum, containing contributions from 9 European countries and South-Africa. The second volume appeared about a year later, containing material from some 10 other countries, again predominantly European. Almost simultaneously with the appearance of the first volume, on December 1, 1949, an international meeting of linguists-bibliographers was held in Paris to discuss the organisation of an annual linguistic bibliography; and indeed, in the preface to the second volume CIPL announced the continuation on an annual basis. The first of these annual volumes appeared in 1951.

Beginning with the 1948 volume, there was a sharp decrease in the number of international correspondents. Where the first two volumes counted a total of 27 contributors (including Jan Beylsmit), the 1948 volume listed only 8, beside Beylsmit. For BL 1953 Beylsmit had the assistance of only 4 contributors; in 1959 the number was back on 8 and this remained the maximum number of external contributors until the early 80’s. In the first years it was still "the Office of CIPL", in fact prof. Mohrmann, who took editorial responsability, but step by step the full burden of collecting, classifying and editing data, including all contacts with contributors, was laid on the shoulders of Beylsmit, although it lasted until BL 1956 (published in 1958) before this state of affairs found its expression in print. From that volume on the name of Beylsmit was set apart as "editor", followed by a list of contributors, and users were requested to direct "all correspondence regarding the Linguistic Bibliography" to the editor’s address.

In the ten years that had passed, the financial conditions for the BL had remained rather unfavorable. The UNESCO subvention was sufficient to have the volumes printed, but the editor’s salary was a permanent point of dispute. In 1961 CIPL received "emergency subventions" from the Dutch government and from the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) in Washington. The CAL renewed its emergency subvention in 1962 and in the meantime applied for a subvention from the National Science Foundation, which was granted for the period 1963-1966.

The assistance of the CAL proved important not only for the position of the editor. The 2 years lag that had always existed between the year of BL’s publication and the year covered, was seen more and more as a serious disadvantage. Moreover, keeping track of all linguistic publications, a heavy task from the beginning, gradually became impossible for one man as the production of these publications kept growing. And, not unimportant from the point of view of the CAL, some branches of linguistics such as applied linguistics and machine translation, and some geographical areas such as Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, were not adequately covered in BL. The CAL produced a Proposal to strengthen and improve the Linguistic Bibliography, submitted to the National Science Foundation in 1962.

An agreement was drawn up by which the CAL was to furnish bibliographical data on their own field (applied linguistics, machine translation, statistical and mathematical linguistics) and from "the Asian area". CIPL would take care of a better coverage of the Soviet and Eastern European area - this was accomplished by the appointment in October 1963 of the Dutch slavist Nico Schroten as assistant editor, with the Slavic languages as his special field. Whatever the reasons, the NSF grant and, as a result, the practical assistance by CAL was not prolonged after 1966. Thus, CIPL and BL found themselves in the same difficult position as before. A number of new subsidizers were found, summed up in BL 1966; but the funds raised in this way could not amend for the loss of the NSF grant. It was only in 1970 that the position of an assistant-editor was secured, when the Dutch Ministry of Education and Science agreed to fund the salaries of the BL staff.

In 1981 Beylsmit had reached the age of 61, and began to think of early retirement. In order to facilitate a smooth transition to a new editorship, a second assistant-editor was attracted in September 1982 – a young linguist this time: the Ghent classicist Mark Janse, who had recently come in contact with Secretary-General E.M. Uhlenbeck when he sought feedback in writing his thesis.

The year 1983 brought two changes that in the long term proved crucial for the BL. First, new and better housing was found for the BL staff. Now Uhlenbeck came to an agreement with the director-general of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands, to house the BL staff in two rooms in the brand-new library building in The Hague. As a result this library took over the formal task of paying the salaries of the editors, the funds for which were still being furnished by the Dutch Ministry of Education and Science, apart from the library’s regular budget. In the course of time, as a side effect of some changes in government policies, the BL staff became completely integrated into the library organisation. This development perfectly fitted the objectives of CIPL’s new secretary-general, the Leyden lexicologist Piet van Sterkenburg, who succeeded Uhlenbeck in 1992. He was of the opinion that the BL staff should work in an unambiguous organizational surrounding, no longer dependent on the whims of subsidizers or the good fate of CIPL. Thus, since September 1996 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek has a "Bureau Linguistic Bibliography" which since September 1999 functions as one of the three constituent parts of the department for "Scientific Bibliography and Documentation". CIPL now supports the efforts of the library and its Bureau by contributing to the assistant’s salary, supervises as legal owner of the concept the content of the work and is, of course, involved in the discussion about BL’s future.

Returning to the year 1983, it was Beylsmit’s retirement in that year, at the age of 62, that constituted the other major change. Two editors now stepped in his place, Hans Borkent and Mark Janse, while Beylsmit kept contributing especially to the Baltic and Slavic language sections, and continued to give his assistance in preparing the annual volumes for print. In the years of Beylsmit’s editorship BL had grown from a rather slim volume (the first annual volume, for 1948, counted 285 pages) to a stout work of 911 pages for 1981. BL 1962, the first volume where items were numbered, counted a total of 9,241 entries, the 1981 volume contains 15,069 entries. The classification had been modernized and extended now and again. Beginning with BL 1962 the sections for individual languages were subdivided along the lines of the General linguistics section; in BL 1972 a major revision of the classification scheme had been implemented and smaller revisions had followed in later years. The number of contributors, however, had remained as small as it was in 1950: a total of 9 for BL 1981; and the increase in the time lag that had occurred in the early 70’s had not been eliminated: BL 1981 appeared in 1984. CAL’s suggestions for improvement had led to nothing – a keyword index was (and is) still lacking; no attempts were made to apply computer technology. Nevertheless, all these years BL was welcomed with praise by almost all reviewers: "a major bibliography in this field", "Grundbibliographie auch der griechischen Sprachwissenschaft", "Lingvistikabibliografia suurteos/Das Meisterwerk der Linguistic Bibliography" were some of the qualifications.

The new editorial team started with two clear projects: to reduce the time lag and to improve the coverage of linguistic literature by broadening the network of contributors. Both goals were realized remarkably soon: in 1985 two volumes appeared, covering the years 1982 and 1983 respectively, thus returning to the original time lag of two years. Moreover, BL 1984 contains a list of 18 contributors, a number that increased to 42 in subsequent years.

On the 19th of February 1986 Jan Beylsmit died, only 64 years old. To fill the gap he left behind, especially in collecting and editing Baltic and Slavic data, a new assistant editor was found: Sijmen Tol, then a librarian with a background in Slavic linguistics. A few years later, in 1989, Borkent found employment that suited him better, in his own field of specialisation, and Tol succeeded him as an editor.

It was only in 1990 that computerisation became a serious point of discussion.

Kluwer initiated some studies to analyze the complete process of producing the bibliography and in the spring of 1994 a session was organized at Kluwer’s offices to demonstrate a model of an input and editing system for BL, that should result in a database from which were to be extracted both printed and electronic versions of the bibliography. The expectations then were, that a first version of this system could be implemented within a few months, in January-February 1995 in order to produce the next volume, BL 1993, toward the end of 1995. However, no BL appeared that year, and when it appeared eventually in June 1996, it showed quite a lot of visible shortcomings. Nonetheless, what was called the "the BL-system" was developed further by InfoControl, a company now operating under the name ILOX.

It took no blood, but it did take a lot of people a very great deal of effort, much irritation, sweat and even, at times, tears, not to forget the money and much more time than anyone could have foreseen at the outset, before the input, editing and retrieval system that is now operating under the name "BibLing" reached its completion. The time lag between the year of publication and the year covered has even grown to four years, and plans to publish BL on CD-ROM were aborted after one unsuccesful prototype in 1997. But by the end of the year 2000 the teething troubles had been overcome; and although there remained wishes to be fulfilled, the celebration of BL’s 50th volume appeared a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the prototype of an on-line retrieval system, enabling the international linguistic community to search the BL-database directly.

In the year 2000 expectations were that it would not take more than 3-4 months to turn the prototype of BLonline into a definitive version. Again, the problems of digital reality were grossly underestimated: it was not before June 2002 that the electronic version of the Linguistic Bibliography could be proudly presented to its future users (Sijmen Tol).