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Paul Otlet | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Otlet in 1937 | |
| Born | (1868-08-23)23 August 1868 Brussels, Belgium |
| Died | 10 December 1944(1944-12-10) (aged 76) Brussels, Belgium |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for | One of several people who have been considered the founders ofinformation science |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Information science |
| Institutions | Institut International de Bibliographie (now theInternational Federation for Information and Documentation) |
Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (/ɒtˈleɪ/;French:[pɔlmaʁiɡilɛ̃ɔtlɛ]; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian author, lawyer and peace activist; who was a foundational figure in documentalism, a precursory discipline to information science.
Otlet created theUniversal Decimal Classification, which would later become afaceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU). RBU was used by theInternational Institute of Bibliography which later became theMundaneum. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize and connect knowledge, culminating in two books, theTraité de Documentation (1934) andMonde: Essai d'universalisme (1935).[1][2] His ideas for information collection, storage and retrieval have been compared to early incarnations of the internet and search engines.[3]
In 1907, following a huge international conference, Otlet andHenri La Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations, which was renamed to theUnion of International Associations in 1910, and which is still located inBrussels. They also created a great international center called at firstPalais Mondial (World Palace), later, theMundaneum to house the collections and activities of their various organizations and institutes. Otlet witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information, resulting in the creation of new kinds of international organization.
Otlet also endorsed the internationalist politics of theLeague of Nations and itsInternational Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner ofUNESCO) along with fellow Mundaneum founder La Fontaine.
Otlet was born inBrussels,Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child ofÉdouard Otlet (Brussels 13 June 1842-Blanquefort,France, 20 October 1907) and Maria (née Van Mons). His father, Édouard, was a wealthy businessman, selling and operating trams in the North of France. Through his mother, he was related to the Van Mons family, a prosperous family, and to the Verhaeren family, of whichEmile Verhaeren was a notable Belgian poet. His mother died in 1871 at the age of 24, when Otlet was three. As a child Otlet had few friends, and only regularly played with his younger brother Maurice. He soon developed a love of reading and books.[4]
His father kept him out of school, believing classrooms were a stifling environment. Eduoard opted to tutor the young Otlet at home during his primary schooling[5]
At the age of six, financial hardships caused the family to move toParis. Otlet went to school for the first time at 11. He started his formal schooling at aJesuit school in Paris, where he stayed for the next three years. The family then returned to Brussels when Otlet was 14, and began to study at the prestigiousCollège Saint-Michel[6] in Brussels. In 1894, his father became asenator in theBelgian Senate for theCatholic Party. His father remarried to Valerie Linden, daughter of famed botanistJean Jules Linden; the two eventually had five additional children. The family travelled often during this time, going on holidays and business trips toItaly, France andRussia.[7]
Otlet was educated at theCatholic University of Leuven and at theFree University of Brussels. His interests at university consisted of theology, philosophy and sciences before settling on law. He earned a law degree on 15 July 1890. He married his step-cousin, Fernande Gloner, soon afterward, on 9 December 1890. He then clerked with famed lawyerEdmond Picard, a friend of his father's.[8]: 20–1
Otlet soon became dissatisfied with his legal career, and began to take an interest inbibliography. His first published work on the subject was the essay "Something about bibliography", written in 1892. In it he expressed the belief that books were an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them was an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, making individual facts difficult to locate. A better storage system, Otlet wrote in his essay, would be cards containing individual "chunks" of information, that would allow "all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling." In addition would be needed "a very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge" that could allow classification of all of these chunks of data.[9]
In 1891, Otlet metHenri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends. They were commissioned in 1892 by Belgium's Societé des Sciences sociales et politiques (Society of social and political sciences) to create bibliographies for various of the social sciences; they spent three years doing this. In 1895, they came across theDewey Decimal Classification, a library classification system that had been invented in 1876 byMelvil Dewey. They decided to try to expand this system to cover the classification of facts that Otlet had previously developed. They wrote to the system's creator, asking for permission to modify his system in a way closer to Otlet's system; he agreed, so long as their system was not translated into English. They began work on this expansion soon afterwards and thus created theUniversal Decimal Classification.
During this time, Otlet and his wife then had two sons, Marcel and Jean, in quick succession.
Otlet founded theInstitut International de Bibliographie (IIB) in 1895 with La Fontaine after organizing theFirst International Conference on Bibliography together. later renamed as (in English) theInternational Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). The FID was later renamed after Otlet’s death to The International Federation for Information and Documentation (Fédération Internationale d'Information et de Documentation, FID) in 1988, before eventually closing in 2002.
In 1894, he hadArt Nouveau architectOctave van Rysselberghe build his mansion in Brussels, the so-calledHotel Otlet.[10][11]
In 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine also began the creation of a collection of index cards, meant to catalog facts, that came to be known as the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU), or the "Universal Bibliographic Repertory". By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach more than 15 million entries.
In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Charles van den Heuvel has referred to the service as an "analogsearch engine".[4] By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.[8]: 120–22
Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris,Washington, D.C. andRio de Janeiro; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards.
In 1904, Otlet and La Fontaine began to publish their classification scheme, which they termed theUniversal Decimal Classification. The UDC was originally based on Melvil Dewey's Decimal classification system. Otlet and La Fontaine contacted Melvil Dewey to inquire if they could modify the Dewey Decimal System to suit the parameters of their bibliographic project, namely, organizing information in the social and natural sciences. Dewey granted them permission as long as it substantially differed from his original version.[12] They worked with numerous subject experts, for example withHerbert Haviland Field at theConcilium Bibliographicum for Zoology, and completed this initial publication in 1907. The system defines not only detailed subject classifications, but also an algebraic notation for referring to the intersection of several subjects; for example, the notation "31:[622+669](485)" refers to thestatistics ofmining andmetallurgy inSweden. The UDC is an example of an analytico-synthetic classification, i.e., it permits the linking of one concept to another. Although some have described it as faceted, it is not, though there are some faceted elements in it. A truly faceted classification consists solely of simple concepts; there are many compound concepts listed in the UDC. It is still used by many libraries and bibliographic services outside the English-speaking world, and in some non-traditional contexts such as theBBC Archives.
In 1906, with his father Édouard near death and his businesses falling apart, Paul and his brother and five step-siblings formed a company,Otlet Frères ("Otlet Brothers") to try to manage these businesses, which included mines and railways. Paul, though he was consumed with his bibliographic work, became president of the company. In 1907, Édouard died, and the family struggled to maintain all parts of the business. In April 1908, Paul Otlet and his wife began divorce proceedings. Otlet remarried in 1912, to Cato Van Nederhesselt.
In 1913, La Fontaine won theNobel Peace Prize, and invested his winnings into Otlet and La Fontaine's bibliographic ventures, which were suffering from lack of funding. Otlet journeyed to theUnited States in early 1914 to try to get additional funding from the U.S. Government, but his efforts soon came to a halt due to the outbreak ofWorld War I. Otlet returned to Belgium, but quickly fled after it became occupied by the Germans; he spent the majority of the war in Paris and various cities inSwitzerland. Both his sons fought in the Belgian army, and one of them, Jean, died during the war in theBattle of the Yser.
Otlet spent much of the war trying to bring about peace, and the creation of multinational institutions that he felt could avert future wars. In 1914, he published a book, "La Fin de la Guerre" ("The End of War") that defined a "World Charter of Human Rights" as the basis for an international federation.
In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine first envisioned a "city of knowledge", which Otlet originally named the "Palais Mondial" ("World Palace"), that would serve as a central repository for the world's information. In 1919, soon after the end of World War I, they convinced the government of Belgium to give them the space and funding for this project, arguing that it would help Belgium bolster its bid to house theLeague of Nations headquarters. They were given space in the left wing of thePalais du Cinquantenaire, a government building inBrussels. They then hired staff to help add to their Universal Bibliographic Repertory.
In 1921 Otlet wrote toW. E. B. Du Bois offering the use of the Palais Mondial for the2nd Pan-African Congress. Although both Otlet and Fontaine offered a warm welcome to the Congress, these sentiments were not shared across all of Belgian society. The Brussels-based paperNeptune stated that the organisers – particularly theNational Association for the Advancement of Coloured People were funded by theBolsheviks – and raised concern that it might lead to difficulties in theBelgian Congo by drawing together "all the ne’er-do-wells of the various tribes of the Colony, aside from some hundreds of labourers".[13]
The Palais Mondial was briefly shuttered in 1922, due to lack of support from the government of Prime MinisterGeorges Theunis, but was reopened after lobbying from Otlet and La Fontaine. Otlet renamed the Palais Mondial to the Mundaneum in 1924. The RBU steadily grew to 13 million index cards in 1927; by its final year, 1934, it had reached more than 15 million.[14] Index cards were stored in custom-designed cabinets, and indexed according to the Universal Decimal Classification. The collection also grew to include files (including letters, reports, newspaper articles, etc.) and images, contained in separate rooms; the index cards were meant to catalog all of these as well. The Mundaneum eventually contained 100,000 files and millions of images.
In 1934, the Belgian government again cut off funding for the project, and the offices were closed. (Otlet protested by keeping vigil outside the locked offices, but to no avail.) The collection remained untouched within those offices, however, until 1940, whenGermany invaded Belgium. Requisitioning the Mundaneum's quarters to hold a collection ofThird Reich art and destroying substantial amounts of its collections in the process, the Germans forced Otlet and his colleagues to find a new home for the Mundaneum. In a large but decrepit building inLeopold Park they reconstituted the Mundaneum as best as they could, and there it remained until it was forced to move again in 1972, well after Otlet's death.
The World City or Cité Mondiale is a utopian vision by Paul Otlet of a city which like a universal exhibition brings together all the leading institutions of the world.[15] The World City would radiate knowledge to the rest of the world and construct peace and universal cooperation. Otlet’s idea to design a utopian city dedicated to international institutions was largely inspired by the contemporary publication in 1913 by the Norwegian-American sculptorHendrik Christian Andersen and the French architectErnest Hébrard of an impressive series of Beaux-Arts plans for a World Centre of Communication (1913). For the design of his World City, Otlet collaborated with several architects. In this way a whole series of designs for the World City was developed. The most elaborated plans were: the design of a Mundaneum (1928) and a World City (1929) byLe Corbusier in Geneva next to the palace of the League of Nations, by Victor Bourgeois in Tervuren (1931) next to the Congo Museum, again by Le Corbusier (in collaboration withHuib Hoste) on the left bank in Antwerp (1933), by Maurice Heymans in Chesapeake Bay near Washington (1935), and by Stanislas Jassinski and Raphaël Delville on the left bank in Antwerp (1941). In these different designs the program of the World City stayed more or less fixed, containing a World Museum, a World University, a World Library and Documentation Centre, Offices for the International Associations, Offices or Embassies for the Nations, an Olympic Centre, a residential area, and a park.
Otlet integrated new media, as they were invented, into his vision of the networked knowledge-base of the future. In the early 1900s, Otlet worked with engineerRobert Goldschmidt on storing bibliographic data onmicrofilm (then known as "micro-photography"). These experiments continued into the 1920s, and by the late 1920s he attempted along with colleagues to create an encyclopedia printed entirely on microfilm, known as theEncyclopaedia Microphotica Mundaneum, which was housed in the Mundaneum. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote about radio and television as other forms of conveying information, writing in the 1934Traité de documentation that "one after another, marvellous inventions have immensely extended the possibilities of documentation." In the same book, he predicted that media that would convey feel, taste and smell would also eventually be invented, and that an ideal information-conveyance system should be able to handle all of what he called "sense-perception documents".
Otlet spent much of his life advocating for international cooperation and peace. TheUnion of International Associations, which he had founded in 1907 with Henri La Fontaine, later participated to the development of both theLeague of Nations and theInternational Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which was later merged withUNESCO. Otlet’s organization provided support to the 1921Pan-African Congress at the Palais Mondial (later: Mundaneum).
Contemporary critics have raised concerns with his endeavor to catalog and classify is an expression of the commitment to the Eurocentric project to structure knowledge according to universal categories and taxonomies, of which the Universal Decimal Classification is an example.[16]
During his lifetime Otlet published statements starting withL'Afrique Aux Noirs (1888)[17] where he argued that White people and "Westernized" Blacks were to be tasked withcivilizing Africa. Similarly, inMonde (1935),[18] near the end of his life, Otlet claimed the biological superiority of White people. His reasoning related to historic concepts of intellectual Enlightenment throughEugenics and theWhite Man's Burden.
In 1933, Otlet proposed building in Belgium nearAntwerp a "gigantic neutralWorld City" to employ a massive number of workers, in order to alleviate the unemployment generated by theGreat Depression.[19]
Otlet died in 1944, not long before the end of World War II, having seen his major project, the Mundaneum, shuttered, and having lost all his funding sources. According to Otlet scholarW. Boyd Rayward:
And:
In the wake ofWorld War II, the contributions of Otlet to the field of information science were lost sight of in the rising popularity of the ideas of American information scientists such asVannevar Bush,Douglas Engelbart,Ted Nelson and by such theorists of information organization asSeymour Lubetzky.
Beginning in the 1980s, and especially after the advent of theWorld Wide Web in the early 1990s, new interest arose in Otlet's speculations and theories about the organization of knowledge, the use of information technologies, and globalization. His 1934 masterpiece, theTraité de documentation, was reprinted in 1989 by theCentre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française in Belgium.[21] (Neither the Traité nor its companion work, "Monde" (World) has been translated into English so far.) In 1990 Professor W. Boyd Rayward published an English translation of some of Otlet's writings.[22] He also published a biography of Otlet (1975) that was translated into Russian (1976) and Spanish (1996, 1999, and 2005).
In 1985, Belgian academicAndré Canonne raised the possibility of recreating the Mundaneum as an archive and museum devoted to Otlet and others associated with them; his idea initially was to house it in the Belgian city ofLiège. Cannone, with substantial help from others, eventually managed to open the new Mundaneum inMons, Belgium in 1998. This museum is still in operation, and contains the personal papers of Otlet and La Fontaine and the archives of the various organizations they created along with other collections important to the modern history of Belgium.
Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward has written that Otlet's thinking is a product of the 19th century and the philosophy ofpositivism, which holds that, through careful study and thescientific method, an objective view of the world can be gained. According to W. Boyd Rayward, his ideas placed him culturally and intellectually in theBelle Époque period of pre–World War I Europe, a period of great "cultural certitude".
Otlet's writings have sometimes been called prescient of the currentWorld Wide Web.[23] His vision of a great network ofknowledge was centered ondocuments and included the notions ofhyperlinks,search engines, remote access, andsocial networks—although these notions were described by different names.[24] In 1934, Otlet laid out this vision of the computer and internet in what he called "Radiated Library" vision.[25]
Paul Otlet's grave is located in the Etterbeek Cemetery, inWezembeek-Oppem, Flemish Brabant, Belgium.
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