Keys Corner

Short video illustrating some of Otlet’s ideas
Paul Otlet (1868 – 1944) proposed many of the ideas which have been implemented in the world wide web – including the idea of a library of information much like Wikipedia – and actually implemented his ideas in the form of the Mundaneum, back in 1910. The Mundaneum, occupying 150 rooms in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire was an attempt to organise all the knowledge in the world according to the Universal Decimal Classification and resulted in building a highly structured card index system containing over 15 million index cards referencing information sources by 1934, which ultimately were to be made accessible to anyone who wished to access it, in their home, using TV screens and the phone. He even used the term “réseau” when talking about his idea of connecting information and people – which means “network”.

Unfortunately the idea died and was forgotten after the Germans took over the building housing the Mundaneum at the beginning of the Second World War, and much of the information in the Mundaneum was lost and scattered as a result.

If you haven’t heard of him, neither had I – until I stumbled over an article in yesterday’s El País (Google translation to English here).

The article tickled my curiosity and I found that there had been a Google Tech Talk by Alex Wright made last October on early ideas around information technology that could have lead to different versions of the internet, which devotes some time to explaining Otlet’s ideas (approx. one hour viewing time). If you are interested in technology and have the time, the talk is worth watching – if you can’t spare so much time, there is a short and interesting article about Otlet here. There’s a slightly longer and interesting article by W. Boyd Raymond (who discovered a large collection of Otlet’s documents in an abandoned office in Belgium in 1968), about Otlet here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 13:07:24 and is filed under Computing, Europe, Language / Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.