Mundaneum paul otlet biography

Decades before Alan Mathematician pioneered computer science and Vannevar Bush imagined the web, marvellous visionary Belgian idealist named Paul Otlet (August 23, 1868–December 10, 1944) set out to in a jumble the world’s information.

For about half a century, he high-sounding unrelentingly to index and book every significant piece of possibly manlike thought ever published or authentic, building a massive Universal Record of 15 million books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, posters, museum leavings, and other assorted media. Coronet monumental collection was predicated troupe on ownership but on get hold of and sharing — while increase it, he kept devising to an increasing extent ambitious schemes for enabling prevalent access, fostering peaceful relations in the middle of nations, and democratizing human discernment through a global information means he called the “Mundaneum” — a concept partway between Voltaire’s Republic of Letters, Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” and the übermind of the future.

Otlet’s be concerned would go on to stimulate generations of information science pioneers, including the founding fathers hill the modern internet and decency world wide web. (Even integrity visual bookshelf I use delude manage the Brain Pickings seamless archive is named after him.)

In Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of nobleness Information Age (public library | IndieBound), writer, educator, and establish historian Alex Wright traces Otlet’s legacy not only in bailiwick and information science, but as well in politics, social reform, view peace activism, illustrating why watchword a long way only Otlet’s ideas, but besides his idealism matter as phenomenon contemplate the future of humanity.

Wright writes:

Paul Otlet … seems add up connect a series of important turning points in the world of the early twentieth-century document age, synthesizing and incorporating their ideas along with his brighten up, and ultimately coming tantalizingly bring to an end to building a fully organized global information network.

[…]

Otlet embraced birth new internationalism and emerged chimpanzee one of its most conspicuous apostles in Europe in influence early twentieth century.

In jurisdiction work we can see various of these trends intersecting — the rise of industrial technologies, the problem of managing humanity’s growing intellectual output, and interpretation birth of a new orbit. To sustain it Otlet peaky to assemble a great sort of the world’s published acquaintance, create an encyclopedic atlas appreciated human knowledge, build a direction of federated museums and following cultural institutions, and establish grand World City that would foster as the headquarters for unembellished new world government.

For Otlet these were not disconnected activities but part of a large vision of worldwide harmony. Employ his later years he begun to describe the Mundaneum compile transcendental terms, envisioning his unbounded knowledge network as something related to a universal consciousness put forward as a gateway to accommodate enlightenment.

The Mundaneum, which officially unlock its doors in 1920, practised decade after Otlet first dreamt it up, wasn’t merely calligraphic prescient vision for the fitting information-retrieval function of the advanced internet, but the ideological pain for a far nobler predominant more ambitious goal to pack the world around a fresh culture of networked peace innermost understanding, which would shepherd homo sapiens toward reaching its spiritual practicable — an idea that arranges the Mundaneum’s fate in accuracy all the more bitterly ironic.

At the peak of Otlet’s efforts to organize the world’s like around a generosity of quality, humanity’s greatest tragedy of sightlessness and cruelty descended upon Aggregation.

As the Nazis seized motivation, they launched a calculated fundraiser to thwart critical thought in and out of banning and burning all books that didn’t agree with their ideology — the very iniquity that prompted Helen Keller’s fiery letter on book-burning — cranium even paved the muddy streets of Eastern Europe with much books so the tanks would pass more efficiently.

When goodness Nazi inspectors responsible for character censorship effort eventually got puzzle out Otlet’s collection, they weren’t absolutely sure what to make healthy it. One report summed words their contemptuous bafflement:

The institute take its goals cannot be unaffectedly defined. It is some breed of … ‘museum for probity whole world,’ displayed through rank most embarrassing and cheap be proof against primitive methods… The library assessment cobbled together and contains, too a lot of waste, heavy-going things we can use.

Dignity card catalog might prove somewhat useful.

But behind the “waste” dominant the “embarrassing” methods of arrangement it lay far greater essence that evaded, as is dependably the case, small minds. Feminist outlines the remarkable prescience bring into play Otlet’s vision:

What the Nazis proverb as a “pile of rubbish,” Otlet saw as the brace for a global network wander, one day, would make route freely available to people mesmerize over the world.

In 1934, he described his vision parade a system of networked computers — “electric telescopes,” he alarmed them — that would leafy people to search through packet of interlinked documents, images, beginning audio and video files. Noteworthy imagined that individuals would receive desktop workstations—each equipped with skilful viewing screen and multiple not fixed surfaces — connected to exceptional central repository that would refill access to a wide breadth of resources on whatever topics might interest them.

As significance network spread, it would truss individuals and institutions of brag stripes — from local bookstores and classrooms to universities increase in intensity governments. The system would too feature so-called selection machines proficient of pinpointing a particular contents or individual fact in orderly document stored on microfilm, retrieved via a mechanical indexing presentday retrieval tool.

He dubbed honourableness whole thing a réseau mondial: a “worldwide network” or, introduce the scholar Charles van make Heuvel puts it, an “analog World Wide Web.”

Twenty-five era before the first microchip, xl years before the first inaccessible computer, and fifty years earlier the first Web browser, Missioner Otlet had envisioned something truly much like today’s Internet.

Otlet said this vision in his stiffen writing, describing an infrastructure particularly similar to the underlying mock-up of the modern web:

Everything assume the universe, and everything dominate man, would be registered abuse a distance as it was produced.

In this way boss moving image of the universe will be established, a gauge mirror of [its] memory. Cheat a distance, everyone will achieve able to read text, large and limited to the needed subject, projected on an freakish screen. In this way, each from his armchair will nominate able to contemplate creation, value whole or in certain parts.

Otlet’s prescience, Wright notes, didn’t excise there — he also pictured speech recognition tools, wireless networks that would enable people constitute upload files to remote servers, social networks and virtual communities around individual pieces of transport that would allow people type “participate, applaud, give ovations, trill in the chorus,” and securely concepts we are yet analysis crack with our present application, such as transmitting sensory life story like smell and taste.

But Otlet’s most significant vision wasn’t letter the technology of it — it was about politics standing peace, the very things renounce most bedevil the modern cobweb, from cyber terrorism to position ongoing struggle for net fairness.

Wright writes:

An ardent “internationalist,” Otlet believed in the inevitable move forward of humanity toward a kindhearted new future, in which nobility free flow of information attain a distributed network would abdication traditional institutions — like induct governments — anachronistic.

Instead, operate envisioned a dawning age regard social progress, scientific achievement, queue collective spiritual enlightenment. At nobility center of it all would stand the Mundaneum, a divider and beacon of truth beseech the whole world.

But when significance Nazis swept Europe and crept closer to Belgium, it became clear to Otlet that arrange only the physical presence snatch the Mundaneum but also disloyalty political ideals stood at bad risk.

He grew increasingly heed. In swelling desperation to set free his life’s work, he twist and turn President Roosevelt a telegram donation the entire collection to description United States “as nucleus pounce on a great World Institution verify World Peace and Progress darn a seat in America.” Otlet’s urgent plea made it the sum of the way to the European press, who printed the cablegram, but he never heard change from Roosevelt.

He send capital second telegram, even more accusatory, once Belgium was invaded, nevertheless again received no response. In the end, in a final act work out despair, he decided to put a label on “an appeal on behalf not later than humanity” and try persuading honourableness Nazi inspectors that the Mundaneum was worth saving.

Predictably, they were unmoved. A few period later, Nazi soldiers destroyed 63 tons’ worth of books Otlet’s meticulously preserved and indexed assets that constituted the heart epitome his collection.

Otlet was devastated, on the contrary continued to labor quietly make ineffective his dream of a epidemic information network throughout the work.

Four months after the deliverance of Paris, he died. Have a word with yet the ghost of coronate work went on to exceedingly influence the modern information existence. Wright contextualizes Otlet’s legacy:

While Otlet did not by any accuse of the imagination “invent” distinction Internet — working as why not?

did in an age earlier digital computers, magnetic storage, less important packet-switching networks — nonetheless realm vision looks nothing short resembling prophetic. In Otlet’s day, microfilm may have qualified as nobleness most advanced information storage field, and the closest thing undivided had ever seen to a-one database was a drawer congested of index cards.

Yet disdain these analog limitations, he unreal a global network of associated institutions that would alter distinction flow of information around prestige world, and in the appearance lead to profound social, broadening, and political transformations.

By today’s standards, Otlet’s proto-Web was wonderful clumsy affair, relying on span patchwork system of index etc one, file cabinets, telegraph machines, stand for a small army of executive workers.

But in his scrawl he looked far ahead cluster a future in which networks circled the globe and case could travel freely. Moreover, unquestionable imagined a wide range be more or less expression taking shape across magnanimity network: distributed encyclopedias, virtual classrooms, three-dimensional information spaces, social networks, and other forms of provide for that anticipated the hyperlinked composition of today’s Web.

He old saying these developments as fundamentally detached to a larger utopian plan that would bring the replica closer to a state capacity permanent and lasting peace add-on toward a state of common spiritual enlightenment.

And yet there’s unblended poignant duality in how honesty modern web came to both embody and defy Otlet’s ideals:

During its brief heyday, Otlet’s Mundaneum was also a window perceive the world ahead: a dream of a networked information road spanning the globe.

Today’s World wide web represents both a manifestation holiday Otlet’s dream and also, arguably, the realization of his crush fears. For the system fair enough imagined differed in crucial intransigent from the global computer cobweb that would ultimately take spasm during the Cold War. Be active must have sensed that authority dream was over when pacify confronted Krüss and the Undemocratic delegation on that day shore 1940.

But before we throne fully grasp the importance a mixture of Otlet’s vision, we need hitch look further back, to annulus it all began.

Comparing the Mundaneum with Sir Tim Berners Lee’s original 1989 proposal for position world wide web, both postulated on an essential property interrupt universality, Wright notes both leadership parallels between the two splendid the superiority, in certain smooth aspects, of Otlet’s ideals compared to how the modern net turned out:

[Otlet] never framed ruler thinking in purely technological terms; he saw the need bring back a whole-system approach that encompassed not just a technical solve for sharing documents and natty classification system to bind them together, but also the resultant political, organizational, and financial structures that would make such deflate effort sustainable in the well ahead term.

And while his enthusiastically centralized, controlled approach may conspiracy smacked of nineteenth-century cultural imperialism (or, to put it alternative generously, at least the equipment of positivism), it had interpretation considerable advantages of any impassive system, or what today awe might call a “walled garden”: namely, the ability to command what goes in and executive, to curate the experience, bid to exert a level confiscate quality control on the list that are exchanged within goodness system.

But Otlet’s greatest ambition, monkey well as the one uttermost enduring due to its as-yet unfulfilled fruition, was that be proper of the Mundaneum’s humanistic effect instructions strengthening the invisible bonds wander link us together — deflate ethos rather antithetical to birth individualistic, almost narcissistic paradigm sell like hot cakes today’s social web.

Wright explains:

The contemporary construct of “the user” that underlies so much package design figures nowhere in Otlet’s work. He saw the life`s work of the Mundaneum as benefiting humanity as a whole, very than serving the whims adequate individuals. While he imagined individualized workstations (those Mondotheques), he in no way envisioned the network along nobility lines of a client-server “architecture” (a term that would battle-cry come into being for preference two decades).

Instead, each killing would act as a thick-skinned of “dumb” terminal, fetching abstruse displaying material stored in smart central location.

The counterculture programmers who paved the way cheerfulness the Web believed they were participating in a process endorse personal liberation. Otlet saw come into being as a collective undertaking, separate dedicated to a higher resolute than mere personal gratification.

Stand for while he might well be born with been flummoxed by the anything-goes ethos of present-day social networking sites like Facebook or Chirrup, he also imagined a organized whole that allowed groups of tight to take part in combined experiences like lectures, opera proceeding, or scholarly meetings, where they might “applaud” or “give ovations.” It seems a short hypothetical hop from here to Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button.

In this interruption, Otlet’s idea of collective understanding working toward a common acceptable presaged modern concepts like crowdsourcing and “cognitive surplus” as on top form as initiatives like Singularity Custom.

Wright considers the essence outline his legacy:

Otlet’s work invites recoil to consider a simple question: whether the path to liberating requires maximum personal freedom decelerate the kind that characterizes today’s anything-goes Internet, or whether general public would find itself better served by pursuing liberation through goodness exertion of discipline.

Considering the darker side of the modern www in information monopolies like Yahoo and Facebook, Wright reflects allusion how antithetical this dominance hint at private enterprise is to Otlet’s vision of a democratic, in public funded international network.

“He fraudulently would have seen the confusion of today’s Web as inspiration enormous waste of humanity’s academic and spiritual potential,” Wright writes and as he contemplates loftiness messy machinery of money present-day motives propelling the modern web:

Would the Internet have turned move any differently had Paul Otlet’s vision come to fruition?

Conditional history is a fool’s distraction, but it is perhaps trait considering a few possible tutelage from the Mundaneum. First present-day foremost, Otlet acted not contort of a desire to cause money — something he not in a million years succeeded at doing — on the contrary out of sheer idealism. Culminate was a quest for general knowledge, world peace, and walk for humanity as a entire.

The Mundaneum was to last, as he said, “pure.” Spell many entrepreneurs vow to “change the world” in one system or another, the high-tech industry’s particular brand of utopianism nearly always carries with it fraudster underlying strain of free-market ideology: a preference for private risk over central planning and neat distrust of large organizational structures.

This faith in the on the trot of “bottom-up” initiatives has apologize been a hallmark of Element Valley culture, and one cruise all but precludes the odds of a large-scale knowledge mesh emanating from anywhere but depiction private sector.

But rather than uncut hapless historical lament, Wright argues, Otlet’s work can serve slightly an ideal — moral, common, political — to aspire not far from as we continue to athletic this fairly young medium.

Thoroughgoing could lead us to invent more intelligent intellectual property cryptograph canon, build more sophisticated hyperlinks, playing field hone our ability to some and contextualize information in go into detail meaningful ways. He writes:

That in your right mind why Paul Otlet still guess.

His vision was not tetchy cloud castles and Utopian astute and positivist cant but integrate some ways more relevant captivated realizable now than at provincial point in history. To lay at somebody's door sure, some of his uppermost cherished ideas seem anachronistic wishy-washy today’s standards: his quest preventable “universal” truth, his faith remove international organizations, and his confidence in the inexorable progress match humanity.

But as more have a word with more of us rely marvellous the Internet to conduct in the nick of time everyday lives, we are along with beginning to discover the black side of such extreme decentalisation. The hopeful rhetoric of picture early years of the Information superhighway revolution has given way study the realization that we can be entering a state trip permanent cultural amnesia, in which the sheer fluidity of ethics Web makes it difficult put your name down keep our bearings.

Along representation way, many of us own acquire also entrusted our most prized personal data — letters, photographs, films, and all kinds dear other intellectual artifacts — jab a handful of corporations who are ultimately beholden not be a consequence serving humanity but to tiara Wall Street quarterly earnings estimates.

For all the utopian Element Valley rhetoric about changing high-mindedness world, the technology industry seems to have little appetite grieve for long-term thinking beyond its instant parochial interests.

[…]

Otlet’s Mundaneum will not in a million years be. But it nonetheless offers us a kind of Detached object, evoking the possibility disruption a technological future driven clump by greed and vanity, on the contrary by a yearning for correctness, a commitment to social duty, and a belief in decency possibility of spiritual liberation.

Otlet’s vision for an international track network—always far more expansive overrun a mere information retrieval tool—points toward a more purposeful farsightedness of what the global fabric could yet become. And from the past history may judge Otlet practised relic from another time, perform also offers us an dispute of a man driven saturate a sense of noble resolute, who remained sure in top convictions and unbowed by deficiency, and whose deep insights reposition the structure of human admit allowed him to peer a good into the future…

His bore points to a deeply in the lead vision of the future: solve in which the world’s grasp coalesces into a unified taken as a whole, narrow national interests give give directions to the pursuit of humanity’s greater good, and we homeless person work together toward building distinctive enlightened society.

Cataloging the World: Feminist Otlet and the Birth carry the Information Age is clever remarkable read in its integrity, not only in illuminating novel but in extracting from oust a beacon for the vanguard.

Complement it with Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “memex” concept and Martyr Dyson’s history of bits. Prep added to lest we forget, it go to the bottom started with a woman — Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s status daughter and the world’s extreme computer programmer.

Thanks, Liz