Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet (born August 23, 1868, Brussels, Belgium—died December 10, 1944, Brussels) was a Belgian bibliographer and entrepreneur whose ambitious Mundaneum project attempted to create a universal repository of all the world’s recorded knowledge. His related writings on information science anticipated the advent of the World Wide Web.

Born to a prosperous Brussels family, Otlet spent his youth largely in the company of tutors before entering secondary school at age 12. After attending the Catholic University of Leuven, he completed his law degree at the Free University of Brussels in 1890. After a brief unsatisfying stint practicing law, Otlet turned his attention to bibliography.

In 1891 he met the lawyer and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, marking the beginning of a long-standing collaboration. In 1895 Otlet and La Fontaine established the International Institute of Bibliography and announced plans to create a Universal Bibliographic Repertory that would serve as a global clearinghouse for bibliographical data. Despite considerable resistance from other European librarians, they pressed forward with their plans, creating a headquarters for the institute and obtaining recognition and a small subsidy from the Belgian government.

Primarily through government subsidies, the institute’s collection grew rapidly, including not only information about books but other kinds of recorded information: photographs, pamphlets, reports, newspaper articles, and so on. A fee-based search service allowed researchers to send queries via mail or telegraph that staff members would then attempt to fulfill by returning copies of entries in the card catalog. By 1927 the Universal Bibliographic Catalog had grown to 13 million index cards. It would peak at 15.6 million in 1934.

In 1904–07 Otlet published the first full version of his new classification scheme, the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), developed over a 10-year period with the cooperation of scholars from around the world. In addition to subject classifications based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, the UDC allowed for algebraic notations (such as “+” symbols) that allowed catalogers to express the relationships between multiple topics. This innovative faceted classification system represented an important departure from most other library cataloging systems, which until then had relied on strictly hierarchical subject classifications. During this period, Otlet also began to experiment with developing microfilm equipment and new processes for copying and publishing documents.

In 1910 Otlet and La Fontaine established the Union of International Associations, a federation of 132 international organizations that would play an important role in the formation of the League of Nations. That same year the two men also created plans for the Palais Mondial (“World Palace”), a new global library and museum that would gather material in various formats from all over the world and provide the foundation for an innovative approach to knowledge visualization. After the end of World War I, they persuaded the Belgian government to sponsor the project in hopes that it would form the intellectual bulwark of a new “World City” that would bolster Belgium’s case for making Brussels the headquarters of the nascent League of Nations. The Belgian government granted space for the installation—which Otlet eventually began referring to as the Mundaneum—in the palace situated in Brussels’s Cinquantenaire Park (Jubilee Park).

After failing in its bid for the League of Nations headquarters, the politically unstable Belgian government began to lose interest in the project, eventually shuttering it altogether in 1934. Otlet and a small team kept working on aspects of the project in private, but the collections remained locked inside the Cinquantenaire Palace until 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium. The contents of the Mundaneum were eventually removed by the German army, which destroyed a substantial portion of the original collection in the process, to allow space for an exhibition of Third Reich art. Otlet relocated what remained of the Mundaneum to a building in Leopold Park in Brussels, where it remained until his death.

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Otlet wrote prolifically about his theories of organizing information on a grand scale. His two major books were the Traité de documentation (1934; “Treatise on Documentation”) and Monde: essai d’universalisme (1935; “World: Essay on Universalism”), in which Otlet described his vision for a worldwide information network that in many ways presaged the advent of the World Wide Web more than 50 years later. “Everything in the universe,” he wrote,

would be registered at a distance as it was produced. Thus a moving image of the world would be established.… From afar, anyone would be able to read any text, expanded or limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. Thus, anyone from his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation or particular parts of it.

After Otlet’s death, the Mundaneum collection remained largely untouched for decades until a small group of researchers began to resurrect his legacy. In 1998 a new Mundaneum Museum and Archive opened in Mons, Belgium, to house Otlet’s personal papers and part of the original Mundaneum collection.