Pursue your dream--and never accept a proven solution! This is ... Paul Otlet

This is

Paul OtletImage credit: flickr.com/marcwathieu/4421630189

He wanted to collect and

organize Image copyright: Unknown

the World’s Knowledge

Formally stated: “Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one of several people who has been considered the father of

modern InformationSciencea field he himself called documentation.”

This and the following citations: wikipedia.org

So what?

Image credit: flickr.com/george_eastman_house/4420695962 Disclaimer: This is not Paul Otlet!

Born on August 23,

1868 in Brussels, Belgium, as

the oldest child to

Image credit: flickr.com/statelibraryofnsw/2964804829

a wealthy businessman who made his fortune

selling

Trams around the world

His mother died at age 24 when Otlet

was three

His father kept him out of school, he had—as a child—few friends, and he soon developed a love of reading and

Image credit: flickr.com/cornelluniversitylibrary/3610752603

Books

Image credit: flickr.com/benchilada/2466968689

Image credit: flickr.com/candiedwomanire/1651870

Books—the accepted and proven storage medium for the

World’s Knowledge

in 1892

An accepted solution.But really an adequate storage medium?

Think about it!

How could you possibly find a book you needed?

There are a few physical instancesof the book

in libraries

somewhere on this planet

Image credit: flickr.com/gadl/3907891398

To complicate things further

“Books are an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them is an arbitrary decision on the part of the author's, making individual facts

difficult to locate”

Image credit: flickr.com/horiavarlan/4263326117

“A better storage system”, Otlet wrote in his first essay in 1892,

“would be cards containing individual ‘chunks’ of information”

Image credit: flickr.com/deano/2865863332

Those chunks would allow “all the manipulations of classification and continuous

interfiling”

Inter-what?

interfiling

Image credit: flickr.com/amattox/3207213522

A Web

Cut.

Already in 1891, Otlet

had met Henri La Fontaine

Image credit: flickr.com/peacepalacelibrary/3095591442

He quit his job as a lawyer and the two men founded the

Universal Bibliographic Repertory—

Image credit: UnknownDisclaimer: This was not Paul’s and Henri’s garage!

a collection of index cards that, by the end of 1895, had grown to 400,000 entries; later it

would reach a height of over 15 million

With capital from the Belgium Society of Social and Political Sciences, a fee-based search service, and La

Fontaine’s Nobel Peace Price winnings, the startup endured until it hit the ceiling of World War I

Image credit: flickr.com/nlscotland/3011962527

After 1919, the two men restarted, relaunched, and rebranded the Repertory

twice as the World Palace and the

Mundaneum, continuing on government

funding, hiring staff, accumulating 15 million

index cards,

drowning in paper, of course

experimenting with new media as well

Image credit: flickr.com/mburpee/2589663547

but being forced to close the shop when Belgium government cut off funding in 1934—

World War II shuttered what was left.

Otlet died in 1944,fading into oblivion

long before Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Larry & Sergey would enter the scene.

Sad story?

Well.Lessons to be learned:

1

Quit your job as a lawyer!

2

Pursue your dream!

3

And never accept a proven solution.

felgner.ch

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