Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one of several people who has been considered the father of Information modern Science; a field he himself called ‘documentation.’

1. This is

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

5. collect
He wanted to and
organize
Image copyright: Unknown

6. World’s
the
Knowledge

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

8. So what?

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

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

11. His mother died at
age 24 when Otlet
was three

12. 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

13. Books
Image credit: flickr.com/benchilada/2466968689

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

15. in 1892

16. An accepted solution.
But really an adequate
storage medium?

17. Think about it!

18. How could you possibly find a
book you needed?

19. There are a few physical instances
of the book

20. in libraries

21. somewhere on
this planet
Image credit: flickr.com/gadl/3907891398

22. To complicate things
further

23. “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

24. “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

25. Those chunks would
allow “all the
manipulations of
classification and
continuous
interfiling”

26. Inter-what?

27. interfiling
Image credit: flickr.com/amattox/3207213522

28. A Web

29. Cut.

30. Already in
1891, Otlet
had met
Henri La
Fontaine
Image credit: flickr.com/peacepalacelibrary/3095591442

31. He quit his job as a
lawyer and the two
men founded the
Universal
Bibliographic
Repertory—
Image credit: Unknown
Disclaimer: This was not Paul’s and Henri’s garage!

32. 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

33. 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

34. After 1919, the two men
restarted, relaunched, and
rebranded the Repertory
World
twice as the
Palace and the
Mundaneum,
continuing on government
funding, hiring staff,
accumulating 15 million
index cards,
drowning in
paper, of course

35. experimenting
with new media
as well
Image credit: flickr.com/mburpee/2589663547

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

37. World War II shuttered
what was left.

38. Otlet died in 1944,
fading into oblivion

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

40. Sad story?

41. Well.
Lessons to be learned:

42. 1

43. Quit your job as a lawyer!

44. 2

45. Pursue your dream!

46. 3

47. And never accept a
proven solution.

48. Wanna read more?
felgner.ch