Paul Otlet (1868 – 1944) was a Belgian lawyer, entrepreneur, peace activist, author, and visionary. He is now considered as one of the fathers of information science, or “documentation”, as he used to call the field. Fascinated by printed books from an early age, he developed a passion for classification, by frequenting the libraries of the schools where he completed his education: “I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle.” In 1907, Otlet created with Henri La Fontaine the Universal Decimal Classification[1]. He was responsible for the adoption in Europe of the standard American 3×5 inch index card used in most library catalogs around the world, at least until the implementation of online public access catalogs (OPAC). He spent his life trying to find out the best way to collect and organize the world’s knowledge. His research resulted in the publication of numerous essays and two books, Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d’universalisme (1935), but, more notably, in what one could certainly labels his major and more ambitious project: the Mundaneum.
Brief history of the Mundaneum
In 1895, Paul Otlet and his friend and future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, came out with the idea of creating a master bibliography of all the world’s published knowledge. “The two men set out to collect data on every book ever published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera — like pamphlets — that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index cards, they went on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million individual entries”. Otlet managed to get public funding and a place (the left-wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels) from the Belgian governments, by arguing that their project of building a “city of knowledge”, a central repository for the world’s information in Belgium, would bolster the country’s application to become host of the League of Nations. From there, “he hired more staff, and established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the world to submit a query via mail or telegraph — a kind of analog search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian finance”.
Unfortunately, the project that had been renamed the Mundaneum in 1924, was progressively buried and forgotten because of political and historical misfortunes. First, the lack of interest of the Belgian government after his application for housing the League of Nations headquarters was rejected, and second, the Nazis march through Belgium in 1940 (they destroyed thousands of boxes filled with index cards). The country remembered Paul Otlet’s colossal enterprise only when in 1968, a young graduate student named W. Boyd Rayward unearthed the Mundaneum’s relics from an abandoned building of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Then, Rayward and a small group of researcher initiated a revival of interest in Otlet’s work, which lead to the development of a Mundaneum museum in Mons in 1988. Today, the museum visitors will discover long rows of catalog drawers with millions of index cards inside of them, and a back-room archive full of books, posters, photographs, newspaper clippings, etc.
Otlet’s Mundaneum: a “paper-made google”[2]
Soon after he started developing his Mundaneum, Paul Otlet had to face the difficulty of managing the information overload he aimed at classifying (the entire World’s knowledge), and with it, the need for space due to paper accumulation. Indeed, electronic data storage did not exist in the 1920’s! But it appears that the solutions he thought of were quite close to what we know today as the World Wide Web.
As Alex Wright explains, in his 1935 book, Monde: Essai d’universalisme, Otlet “laid out his vision of a ‘mechanical, collective brain’ that would house all the world’s information, made readily accessible over a global telecommunications network”. He “sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a ‘réseau,’ which might be translated as ‘network’ — or arguably, ‘web’. (…) “Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities of electronic media.”[3]
Useful Links and bibliography:
– Mundaneum: http://www.mundaneum.org/
– Wright A., The Web time forgot, June 17, 2008 on The New-York Times website:
– L’ homme qui voulait classer le monde : Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum / Françoise Levie, Bruxelles : Les impressions nouvelles, 2006
– Le Mundaneum : les archives de la connaissance / coordination Charlotte Dubray ; auteurs Raphaèle Cornille, Stéphanie Manfroid, Manuela Valentino, Bruxelles : Les impressions nouvelles, 2008
– Paul Otlet : fondateur du Mundaneum (1868-1944) : architecte du savoir, artisan de paix / W. Boyd Rayward, Stéphanie Manfroid, Jacques Gillen, Bruxelles : Les impressions nouvelles, 2010
[1] The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is the world’s foremost multilingual classification scheme for all fields of knowledge, a sophisticated indexing and retrieval tool. Since his first publication, it has been extensively revised and developed, and has become a highly flexible and effective system for organizing bibliographic records for all kinds of information in any medium (it is well suited to multi-media information collections). UDC is used in bibliographic services, documentation centres and libraries in around 130 countries world-wide and has been published in 40 different languages. See http://www.udcc.org/about.htm
[2] « Google de papier », expression from the French newspaper Le Monde.
[3] For more details about Otlet’s and a comparison with today’s web, see Alex Wright’s article in « Useful links and bibliography.
recollectingthearchive 
Leave a comment