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

This is

Paul Otlet Image credit: ﬂickr.com/marcwathieu/4421630189

collectHe wanted to and organize Image copyright: Unknown

World’s theKnowledge

Formally stated: “Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one ofseveral people who has been considered the father of InformationmodernSciencea ﬁeld he himself called documentation.” This and the following citations: wikipedia.org

So what?

Born on August 23,1868 inBrussels, Belgium, as the oldest child to Image credit: ﬂickr.com/george_eastman_house/4420695962 Disclaimer: This is not Paul Otlet!

a wealthy businessman who made his fortune sellingTramsaround the world Image credit: ﬂickr.com/statelibraryofnsw/2964804829

His mother died atage 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

Books—the accepted and proven storage medium for the World’s Knowledge Image credit: ﬂickr.com/candiedwomanire/1651870

in 1892

An accepted solution.But really an adequatestorage medium?

Think about it!

How could you possibly ﬁnd a book you needed?

There are a few physical instances of the book

in libraries

somewhere onthis planet Image credit: ﬂickr.com/gadl/3907891398

To complicate thingsfurther

“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 authors, 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 wouldallow “all themanipulations ofclassiﬁcation andcontinuousinterﬁling”

Inter-what?

interﬁling Image credit: ﬂickr.com/amattox/3207213522

Already in1891, Otlet had met Henri La Fontaine Image credit: ﬂickr.com/peacepalacelibrary/3095591442

He quit his job as alawyer and the twomen founded theUniversalBibliographicRepertory— Image credit: Unknown Disclaimer: 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 LaFontaine’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 menrestarted, relaunched, and rebranded the Repertory World twice as the Palace and theMundaneum,continuing on government funding, hiring staff, accumulating 15 million index cards, drowning in paper, of course

experimentingwith new mediaas well Image credit: ﬂickr.com/mburpee/2589663547

but being forced to close theshop when Belgiumgovernment cut off fundingin 1934—

World War II shutteredwhat was left.

Otlet died in 1944,fading into oblivion

long before Vannevar Bush, DouglasEngelbart, Ted Nelson, and Larry & Sergeywould enter the scene.

Sad story?

Well.Lessons to be learned:

Quit your job as a lawyer!

Pursue your dream!

And never accept aproven solution.

Wanna read more? felgner.ch

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

by Harald Felgner on Oct 13, 2010

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