Today is the 10th birthday of the tiny Mundaneum museum in Mons, Belgium, which was opened to honour the work of Paul Otlet – considered by many to be the founding father of information science.
His ambitious project, the Mundaneum, was set up to gather and classify all the world's knowledge within a system he called the International Network for Universal Documentation; the International Herald Tribune carry a fascinating article about Otlet and his vision of a network of "electric telescopes" through which people would be able to search and read documents, communicate with each other, and "contemplate the whole of creation".
He didn't predict gigabytes of pornography, collaborative fridge magnets or catsthatlooklikehitler.com, but he certainly envisaged a structured, linked indexing system, and succeeding in building an archive of over 12 million index cards using the standard 3x5" size adopted throughout the western world.
Sadly, his work suffered from under-funding from the mid-1930s, and in 1940 the Mundaneum was destroyed by Nazi forces, who replaced Otlet's knowledge bank with a display of Third Reich art.
Otlet died a broken man; one can't help but wonder what he would have made of the "electric telescopes" that we're all using to read about him today.
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