by Mark Ollig

Created on: August 18, 2008

Tim Berners-Lee developed the Internet protocols for connecting hyper-links to images, text, video and audio files over a web browser in 1991.

However, a man named Paul Otlet was working on this "information industry" idea back in 1934.

Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) researched how information could be acquired over a global network using what he called "electric telescopes."

These electric telescopes or modern day computers, would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked images, documents, video and audio files.

He called the whole thing a "rseau," which is a French word meaning "network."

Otlet described a networked world where "anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."

What amazing foresight Mr. Otlet envisioned at that time.

Today, anyone sitting in an armchair has the ability to "contemplate" or "study" more or less "the whole of creation."

Never had I heard of Paul Otlet or any of his research.

My insatiable curiosity had me immediately searching for any and all information about this man.

I learned in Otlet's hometown of Mons Belgium, there is a small museum called the Mundaneum which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary.

The Mundaneum pronounced (mun-da-NAY-um), houses the collection of works by Paul Otlet.

Paul Otlet's pursuit to connect people to knowledge actually stared in 1895, when Otlet met the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine.

Fontaine shared in Otlet's vision of producing one master "bibliography" of the entire world's published knowledge.

They both set out to collect data on every book, newspaper, magazine, photograph, poster and pamphlet ever published, along with a vast collection of written articles that libraries back then usually disregarded.

Otlet persuaded the Belgian government to support their project and to provide them operating space within a government building.

Using the "state-of-the-art" in storage technology available at the time (3-by-5 index cards); they went on to create an enormous gigantic paper database called a "universal catalog of all that had been written."

This universal catalog had more than 17 million individual entries.

Thousands upon thousands of boxes containing these indexed cards were stored in wooden card holder drawers which lined the walls of the Mundaneum.

In 1904 Otlet and Fontaine utilized Melvil Dewey's 1876 creation of the "Dewey Decimal Classification" to create a "map" to all of this collected written knowledge and where it was located inside the

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>