Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet (1868-1944) - Belgian, lawyer turned bibliographer, political activist, Utopian internationalist, futurist, the founding father of documentation (now more commonly referred to as information science), and creator of the Universal Decimal Classification system.

Forefather of Information Science

Otlet devoted his professional life to collecting, recording, organizing and disseminating knowledge. He dreamt of a world where human knowledge would be interlinked and available to everyone worldwide, what he called an International Network for Universal Documentation.

Although he lived long before computers emerged, Otlet's concepts foreshadowed what ultimately became the World Wide Web. His vision of a network of knowledge was based on documents and included notions of hyperlinks, search engines, remote access, and networks.

More precisely, Paul Otlet envisioned a moving desk in the shape of a wheel, powered by a network of spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The purpose of this machine would be to allow users to search, read and write to a database stored on millions of 3X5 index cards. This new research environment would also allow researchers to annotate the relationships between one document and another.

Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an "electric telescope" connected through a telephone line, retrieving an image to be projected remotely on a flat screen. In his time, this idea of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe these relationships, until he invented one: "links".

In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine established the Institut international de bibliographie, which later became the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID), otherwise known as the "House of Documentation". They also established the Repertoire Bibliographique Universel (RBU), an ambitious attempt at developing a master bibliography of the world's accumulated knowledge. With their informational retrieval scheme, they proposed to file, index, and provide information for retrieval on anything of note published anywhere in the world. They were able to make great progress in bringing their plan into reality. By the late 1930's, the RBU had grown to 15 million entries.

From the work of the Institute came the idea for the Union of International Associations (UIA). The UIA is the world's oldest, largest and most comprehensive source of information on global civil society, and to this day, still carries out the sophisticated and visionary concepts of its founders. In developing beyond its initial bibliographical and organizational focus, the UIA continues to seek ways to recognize, honour and represent the full spectrum of human initiatives and preoccupations manifested in an organized manner across national boundaries - both in isolation and within the complex networks of relationships between them.

A short video on Otlet's most important book, Traité de documentation (The Treaty of Documentation) (1'20"; English, with Spanish subtitles)