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Cataloging the World - Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Hardcover)
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Cataloging the World - Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Hardcover)
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In 1934, a Belgian entrepreneur named Paul Otlet sketched out plans
for a worldwide network of computers-or "electric telescopes," as
he called them - that would allow people anywhere in the world to
search and browse through millions of books, newspapers,
photographs, films and sound recordings, all linked together in
what he termed a reseau mondial: a "worldwide web." Today, Otlet
and his visionary proto-Internet have been all but forgotten,
thanks to a series of historical misfortunes - not least of which
involved the Nazis marching into Brussels and destroying most of
his life's work. In the years since Otlet's death, however, the
world has witnessed the emergence of a global network that has
proved him right about the possibilities - and the perils - of
networked information. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright brings
to light the forgotten genius of Paul Otlet, an introverted
librarian who harbored a bookworm's dream to organize all the
world's information. Recognizing the limitations of traditional
libraries and archives, Otlet began to imagine a radically new way
of organizing information, and undertook his life's great work: a
universal bibliography of all the world's published knowledge that
ultimately totaled more than 12 million individual entries. That
effort eventually evolved into the Mundaneum, a vast "city of
knowledge" that opened its doors to the public in 1921 to
widespread attention. Like many ambitious dreams, however, Otlet's
eventually faltered, a victim to technological constraints and
political upheaval in Europe on the eve of World War II. Wright
tells not just the story of a failed entrepreneur, but the story of
a powerful idea - the dream of universal knowledge - that has
captivated humankind since before the great Library at Alexandria.
Cataloging the World explores this story through the prism of
today's digital age, considering the intellectual challenge and
tantalizing vision of Otlet's digital universe that in some ways
seems far more sophisticated than the Web as we know it today.
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