Paul Otlet

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Biography

Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet, 1868 to 1944, was a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, and entrepreneur, generally identified as a founder of information science.[1]

With Henri La Fontaine, later a Nobel Peace laureate, Otlet established the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895.[1] The two formed the Central Office of International Associations in 1907, which became the Union of International Associations in 1910 and still operates in Brussels.[1][2] Both were committed internationalists whose work was bound up with the arguments that produced the League of Nations.[2]

The Art Nouveau architect Octave van Rysselberghe built his Brussels mansion, the Hotel Otlet.[3]

Projects

Universal Decimal Classification

Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, published between 1904 and 1907, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification.[3][1] It took Melvil Dewey's decimal system as a base and extended it into an analytic-synthetic scheme, adding auxiliary tables for relation, time, place, and form so that a cataloguer could express connections between multiple topics rather than assign a single subject.[1][4] It remains in maintenance under the UDC Consortium.[4]

Otlet was also responsible for the widespread adoption in Europe of the standard American 3 by 5 inch index card, which remained the physical basis of library catalogues until online public access catalogues displaced it.[3]

Répertoire Bibliographique Universel

Otlet and La Fontaine began the RBU in 1895 as a collection of index cards intended to catalogue facts rather than only books.[3] It held 400,000 entries by the end of that year.[3] Growth figures vary by source: Britannica gives 13 million cards by 1927 and a peak of 15.6 million in 1934,[1] and one detailed count puts the 1934 figure at 15,646,346.[4] The cards were stored in cabinets built for the purpose and indexed by UDC.[5]

In 1896 Otlet set up a fee-based service answering questions by mail, sending requesters copies of the relevant cards.[3] The scholar Charles van den Heuvel has called this an analog search engine.[3] Queries reached 1,500 per year by 1912 and peaked at 27,000 in 1934.[6] Attempts to establish satellite repertories in Paris, Washington, and Rio, by copying and exporting the cards, did not succeed.[6]

Mundaneum

In 1919 the Belgian government granted space in the left wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire, 150 rooms, on the argument that the project would strengthen Belgium's bid to host the League of Nations.[5][7] Otlet renamed the Palais Mondial the Mundaneum in 1924.[5] Beyond the cards, it accumulated roughly 100,000 files and millions of images.[5]

Le Corbusier signed on to design an international city of the intellect centered on the Mundaneum, describing Otlet's Universal Book as a panorama of the whole of human history from its origins.[7]

In 1934 the Belgian government allocated the wing to the Royal Museum of Art and History, changed the locks, and refused Otlet entry.[8] He kept vigil outside the closed offices.[5] German troops requisitioned the quarters in 1940 to hold an exhibition of Third Reich art, destroying substantial portions of the collection.[5][9] What survived was left in an old anatomy building in Parc Leopold after Otlet's death in 1944, and more than 70 tons of the original contents were destroyed over the following half century.[9] The Mundaneum reopened as a museum and archive in Mons, holding Otlet's personal papers and the archives of the organizations he founded.[2]

Technology

Otlet worked with the engineer Robert Goldschmidt in the early 1900s on storing bibliographic data on microfilm, then called micro-photography, and the experiments continued into the 1920s.[10][2] One product was an encyclopedia printed entirely on microfilm, the Encyclopaedia Microphotica Mundaneum.[2]

In Traité de documentation (1934) he described a workstation for scholars, a mechanical desk from which a user could search, read, and write across the collection, published years before Vannevar Bush's memex.[9] He wrote in the same book that recent inventions had greatly extended what documentation could do, discussed radio and television as distribution channels, and anticipated future media capable of transmitting feel, taste, and smell.[2]

Books

  • Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique (1934)
  • Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935)[3]

In these Otlet set out a vision of a worldwide information network, in many respects anticipating the World Wide Web by more than fifty years.[1]

Assessment

The reception in his own time was not favorable. De Standaard wrote in 1927 that heaven preserve Belgium from a Mundaneum of Otlet's kind, since there were people who would fill every public building with index cards given the chance.[8]

One line of assessment holds that the utopian projects damaged the information science. The Traité was written only in 1934, after the eviction, and had Otlet continued developing the RBU instead of moving through successive Mundaneum schemes, he might have produced something closer to a working analog search engine, since the central bibliographic institute answering queries on demand was feasible if laborious and expensive.[8]

Further Reading

Key texts on Otlet

  • Rayward, W. Boyd. The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. Moscow: VINITI, 1975.
  • Wright, Alex. Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • Levie, Françoise. L'homme qui voulait classer le monde, documentary film, 2002.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Paul Otlet, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Paul Otlet facts for kids, Kiddle.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Paul Otlet, Wikipedia.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Paul Otlet, Grokipedia.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Paul Otlet, New World Encyclopedia.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 The Universe, Seen From An Armchair, History Workshop.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Mundaneum, Atlas Obscura.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Steampunk Google and the World City, Order of the Jackalope.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Forgotten Forefather: Paul Otlet, Boxes and Arrows.
  10. ↑ Paul Otlet: A father of information science, otlet.net.
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