Paul Otlet and the Mundaneum: the forefather of the Internet and his dream of world peace
On March 2012, Google announced a partnership with the Mundaneum, a museum in the Belgian city of Mons. The highly symbolic move helped revive interest in the work of Paul Otlet, the man acknowledged by many as the forefather of the Internet.
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944), was a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, and peace activist, considered by many to be the father of modern information science.
For almost 50 years, he worked tirelessly to gather every important piece of human thought into a gigantic bibliography of 15 million books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, and other media, exposing his views on the organization of information in two books: the ‘Traité de Documentation’ (1934) and ‘Monde: Essai d’universalisme’ (1935).
Otlet worked on ways to collect and organize universal knowledge. He created the ‘Universal Decimal Classification’ system for classifying information and the ‘Repertoire Bibliographique Universel’ (Universal Bibliographic Repertory), an information retrieval methodology used by libraries around the world until it was replaced by the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC).
While working on building his…
