1944: His dream of a global interlinked "web" of documents lying in ruins, information-science pioneer Paul Otlet dies.
The Belgian bibliographer's grand scheme to organize the world's information made him the aspiring Google of his day, but his sprawling card catalog and decimal classification system proved woefully inadequate to the task.
Some historians see in Otlet's work a prototype of the World Wide Web and the hyperlink. Although unsuccessful, it was one of the first known attempts to provide a framework for connecting all recorded culture by creating flexible links that could rapidly lead researchers from one document to another – and perhaps make audible the previously unheard echoes between them. Anticipating postmodern literary theory, Otlet posited that documents have meaning not as individual texts, but only in relationship to each other.
Building on the achievements of Carl Linnaeus (father of the simple genus-species classification and inventor of the 3x5 index card) and Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal System), Otlet developed what some regard as the first faceted classification system.
Otlet briefly won the support of the Belgian government to underwrite his ambitions following World War I, and by the late 1930s he had amassed a catalog consisting of some 15 million index cards and tons of documents. He piled these into a former government building, which he rechristened "The Mundaneum," or city of knowledge. Among other things, the collection sustained a small research business, fielding — for a fee — about 1,500 queries a year by mail and telegram.
At the height of his reputation, Otlet was lionized as a visionary, and the decimal classification system he developed lives on in some libraries in Europe. But he and his work ultimately fell into obscurity after a series of setbacks.
Midway into the project his funding was withdrawn, forcing him to scale back. Then the Nazis destroyed much of his archive during the invasion and occupation of Belgium in 1940.
Otlet fled to Paris, and died four years later, a disappointed man.
Vast portions of his collection survived, however, and Otlet has lately enjoyed renewed recognition for his early contributions to information theory, and as something of a historical curiosity.
Researchers have restored what remains of his work at a museum in Mons, Belgium. (The internet archive hosts a 1998 documentary video by Otlet biographer W. Boyd Rayward.) Scholars have revived studies into his legacy, and his theoretical writings about information science have been recently reprinted, though not yet fully translated into English.
In a 2008 New York Times article, Kevin Kelly (Wired co-founder and Senior Maverick) compared Otlet's work to a steampunk version of the internet, clearly recognizable and parallel to, yet decisively removed from, the ultimate course of progress.
More than anything, Otlet's Mundaneum seems to stand as a kind of Ozymandian empire of the intellect — a colossal ruin, and a failure. But a glorious one.
Source: Various
Photo: The telegraph room at the original Mundaneum in Brussels, Belgium, was filled with electromechanical gadgetry.
