Paul Otlet

the_pillo · Posted: 03 Apr 2010 06:58 pm Post subject: Paul Otlet

I chose to research and write about Paul Otlet. Mr. Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium in 1868. As a child he was home schooled, it wasn’t until his father lost some of his wealth did he go to a regular school. He did not have many friends as a child but, grew to love books and reading. On July 15, 1890 Mr. Otlet received his law degree. A year later he met Henri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer who was interested in bibliography as well. The two became friends and in 1895 they found the Dewey Decimal Classification. This sparked an idea in the two, they promptly wrote to Melvil Dewey the creator of the Dewey Decimal Classification asking permission to modify his system. Mr. Dewey agreed under the stipulation that their system would not be translated into English. They quickly started work on it and founded the “Institut de Bibliographie.”

Later, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine started working on a note card system to catalog facts. This came to be known as the “Repertoire Bibliographique Universel.”
In 1895 they had about 400,000 note cards worth of information. This prompted them to start a fee-based program to answer questions. The recipients of the answers would mail the question to them and they would return copies of the note cards that pertained to their questions. The Scholar Alex Wright is quoted as calling this “The first analog search engine.”

In 1919 they started the Mundaneum, or center of all knowledge. They began to hire staff and began to use their “Repertoire Bibliographique Universel” system to categorize all books. Each fact was printed on a 3x5 note card and referenced to the book it was retrieved from. By 1934 there were an estimated 15 million note cards in the Mundaneum. The Mundaneum also began to catalog all references, including such things as newspaper articles, images, and reports.

Unfortunately, During World War Two when Germany invaded Belgium, They destroyed large portions of the Mundaneum’s information. The remainder was stored in a run down building in Leopold Park. Paul Otlet was in essence the original creator of the concept of Internet databases and search engines and knowledge repositories. Once the Mundaneum was well stocked he tried to send copies of all the information to major cities across the world but, due to shipping and such many never made it. Mr. Otlet died four years after the Mundaneum was destroyed, unrecognized for his work.

Reference:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/otlet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet
http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~wrayward/otlet/PAUL_OTLET_REFLECTIONS_ON_BIOG.HTM

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