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This paper focuses on the first twenty years in the history of library of the International Labour Organization. It examines the origin of the collection, its purchases, its filing system, and its conditions for accessing documents, in order to show that the library was more oriented toward research in social sciences and action, than toward book preservation and storage. It describes the chaotic start of the library, which was faced with a lack of trained librarians as well as the constant arrival of contemporary documents. At one and the same time a library, a documentation center, and a laboratory of social sciences, the library of the International Labour Organization is an institution with a material organization typical of the new documentary regime of the 1920s.