The Belgian Paul Otlet (1868–1944) can be seen as the founding father of bibliography, or what is now called information science. His major achievements include the Universal Decimal Classification, and a series of influential writings including the Traite de documentation (1934) and (1935) on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge. He founded the Institut de Documentation, the Mundaneum , and the still active Union_of_International_Associations to help collect this information.
Paul Otlet devoted his professional life to the problem of making recorded knowledge available to the widest number of people. Although he worked in an age before computer networks, he anticipated and may have indirectly influenced the development of the World Wide Web. His vision of a great "réseau" — Web — of knowledge included notions like hyperlinks, social networks, and the possibility of distributed classification .
Otlet's reputation plunged to obscurity in the wake of World War II (after the Nazis literally destroyed his most ambitious project, the Mundaneum); and his contributions to the field of information science have been overshadowed by an Anglo-centric focus on post-World War II information scientists like Vannevar Bush and Douglas Engelbart.
However, recent years have seen a renewed interest in Otlet's work. The Traité returned to print in 1989. In 1990, Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's best writings.
The Mundaneum in Mons (Belgium) now houses Otlet's archives and museum.
References
- Buckland, Michael. Paul Otlet Bibliography.
- Judge, Anthony Union of International Associations - Virtual Organization. Paul Otlet's 100-year Hypertext Conundrum?
- Rayward, W. Boyd. The Case of Paul Otlet, Pioneer of Information Science, Internationalist, Visionary.
- Rayward, W. Boyd. Otlet, Paul. International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays. (FID 684). Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990.
- Wright, Alex. Forgotten Forefather, Boxes & Arrows, Nov. 10, 2003.
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