web viewinspired by the ddc, ... which was similar to dewey’s efforts in that it was broken...
TRANSCRIPT
RUNNING HEAD: SEEKING INTERNATIONAL UNITY THROUGH INFORMATION
Seeking International Unity through Information:
The Life and Work of Paul Otlet
Lindsay J. Anderson
University of North Texas
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Abstract
This paper explores the life and works of visionary bibliographer Paul Otlet (1868-1944). Otlet,
along with working partner Henri La Fontaine, felt that with knowledge would come
enlightenment and, eventually, world peace. Influenced by the Dewey Decimal Classification
(DDC), they developed a cataloging system still used in many libraries today — Universal
Decimal Classification (UDC) — with the intention of streamlining information retrieval. They
founded the Union of International Associations (UIA), the Institut International de
Bibliographie (IIB), and a physical repository for their catalogued works that still exists today
called the Mundaneum. Otlet accurately foresaw the potential for technology to advance
information retrieval and accurately predicted many elements of today’s internet world.
However, despite Otlet’s work and influence, his life was punctuated by disappointment,
setbacks, and grief. For many years before and since his death, Otlet was an overlooked figure in
information science. In the last few decades, however, his name has become honored once more
as a father of information science thanks to the efforts of various scholars like biographer
Warden Boyd Rayward and companies like Google. Otlet’s influence can be found in school and
public libraries today in the cataloging systems and ways in which we use the internet to access
information.
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Seeking International Unity through Information:
The Life and Work of Paul Otlet
In many respects, the stereotypical image of a quiet academic lost in their own world of
papers and research could be applied to documentarian Paul Otlet. He did dedicate his life to his
passion of information science, he was usually surrounded by stacks of notes, and he was deeply
devoted to his academic pursuits. However, Otlet belied that stereotype in some crucial ways: He
was not blinkered to the world outside of his own work and he did not seek a solitary life focused
only on one scholarly topic. Indeed, Otlet’s true passion was to use information science to create
a portal to information available across the world with the hope that with the understanding
gained by knowledge, international collaboration and worldwide peace could be achieved.
Otlet’s goal was lofty, but his intention and noble optimism were rooted in a deep belief in the
power of knowledge.
Born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868, to well-to-do parents, Otlet’s life could have been
one of privilege, comfort, and ease. However, the death of his mother when he was three years
old (Wright, 2014) set the tone for a childhood and adulthood that was punctuated by troubles
and grief amidst the successes of his work. Otlet’s father, Édouard, was an established
businessman who sold tram systems around the world and had the desire to expand Belgium’s
frontiers onto the international stage (ideas that clearly influenced Paul). After the death of his
wife, Édouard decided his two sons should not attend school as he believed it would limit their
learning (Wright, 2014). Instead, they were raised by tutors and staff as they traveled with him
around the world. On these travels, young Paul began a lifetime habit of meticulously
documenting his days in diaries. He also gathered items from his travels and started his very first
museum, on the first floor of their home: the Musée d’Otlet (Wright, 2014). A collector of
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information had been born. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the studious Paul who spent his formative
years only socializing with his younger brother struggled when he was older and attended school.
His social isolation and predilection for academics made school life a challenge for him.
In the 19th century, Europe was exploring and colonizing Africa. Édouard financed
Belgium’s explorations into the Congo and Paul, though he never visited, became passionate
about matters relating to the repatriotization of freed slaves from America. In his 1888 paper,
L’Afrique aux Noirs, Paul Otlet argued that freed slaves should be sent back to Africa to bring
civilization to the continent. Though his notions may raise eyebrows today, Otlet’s convictions
on Africa and its inhabitants were largely in line with the beliefs of the day and his opinions were
rooted in a desire to spread knowledge around the world. Otlet “saw information as a service
towards people’s development” (Cibangu & Hepworth, 2015, p. 1639) and “a gateway to
collective enlightenment” (Wright, 2014, p. 18). Belgium would later be accused of causing the
deaths of around 10 million Congolese in their colonization efforts (Wright, 2014) and for the
rest of his life Otlet felt Europeans had a responsibility to help Africans.
Otlet’s early life of cataloging his travels and finding a desire to connect the world
through information were the building blocks of the man he was to become. Once finished with
his schooling, Otlet was offered a librarian position at the Jesuit-run school he attended as his
meticulous, analytical nature had been noted. Later, after marrying a cousin, Fernande, having a
child, and his father’s finances flailing, Otlet went to law school in an attempt to create a stable
income for his family. Though qualified, he did not stay in law as the work did not appeal to him
and he once more returned to the world of information science. However, it was while working
in a law office that he met the man who was to become his lifelong working partner and without
whom Otlet’s legacy could have been quite different: Henri La Fontaine (Wright, 2014).
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Like Otlet, La Fontaine (Figure 1) was a pacifist, social
liberal, and was driven by a dedication to information. Their
partnership was one rooted in mutual respect and belief in their
work. In his essay, Henri La Fontaine published in Selected
Essays of Paul Otlet, Otlet describes La Fontaine with
admiration: “Certainly Henri La Fontaine never hung back from
work… He is a kind of being made from steel, with the eyes of
a twenty-year old, for whom ten or eleven hours of work are
natural.” (Otlet, 1990, p. 215). When they first met, neither
could have predicted that La Fontaine’s devotion to peace
would one day win him the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as president of the International
Peace Bureau (Wright, 2014).
Together, Otlet and La Fontaine began creating a bibliography of social literature with
the intention of improving mankind, but expanded the topics over time to include a much wider
scope. They took inspiration from those who went before them like 17th century philosopher
Gottfriend Wilhelm Leibniz, 18th century botanist Abbé François Rozier, and 18th century
physician Gerhard van Swieten who had all used various forms of cards and boxes to catalog
records (Wright, 2014). As a result of the Industrial Revolution and increased literacy, there was
so much data available to be organized, and Otlet and La Fontaine sought to find a way to
standardize its cataloging.
Inspired by the DDC, they started a system they called the Universal Decimal
Classification (UDC) which was similar to Dewey’s efforts in that it was broken into ten
categories and further sub-categories from that, and was numerical. Their system removed the
Figure 1. Henri La Fontaine (1914). Released in conjunction with the Nobel Peace Prize. Public domain. Retrieved from WikiCommons.
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decimal point and instead used a variety of other punctuation marks combined with digits to drill
records down to specific details. This allowed catalog cards to go deep into the content and be
cross-referenced with the end goal that a master catalog of cards could be created and updated
frequently with ease. Otlet wanted to take catalog cards even further by breaking out key
information from publications and coding them in a searchable format. In fact, Otlet expressed
that books themselves were somewhat inconvenient because of the random nature in which
authors could include data and facts (Wright, 2014). Always searching for ways to streamline
access to information, Otlet felt that one book was never enough to answer a query that a patron
may have and to answer a question thoroughly, the patron should be able to cross-reference
bibliographies with smaller chunks of information taken from larger books (Day, 2014). Speed
and efficiency were key.
Despite their first conference being received with mixed reviews in 1895, the partners
created the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB) as a reference agency for patrons and
published Bibliographia Universalis, slowly building their customers and collaborators over
time. By this time, La Fontaine was a Belgian Senator which helped the duo gain support. At the
1900 Paris World’s Fair, they displayed their work in the Grand Pavilion and networked with
information specialists from around the world. Even though they won a grand prize at the fair,
there was still a schism between those who felt cataloging could be cross-curricular and those
who felt the pair were trying to wrangle too much information in one place. However, La
Fontaine and Otlet still envisioned their standardized card cataloging system could be used in all
libraries as a collaborative, networked tool (Wright, 2014).
In his writings, Otlet ruminated on the challenge of there being too much information to
systematically catalog, but instead of acquiescing, he further developed the UDC and looked to
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how it may one day be handled in the future. Otlet suggested that
one day research would not involve card catalogs and multiple
texts, but predicted there would be a desk with a selection
machine incorporating a screen and a telephone where the user
could access all records in one spot (Hahn & Buckland, 1998).
Otlet had predicted the internet. He was excited by the abilities
of the telephone and the use of microfiches (Wright, 2014) and
“foresaw many of the technical advances later made possible by
the advent of the computer.” (Hahn & Buckland, 1998, p. 43).
He even anticipated the potential for social media by predicting
that networked users could comment on the records. While Otlet worked in the traditional
medium of paper and books, he foresaw what the future could look like with startling accuracy.
In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine opened the Palais Mondial (later referred to as the
Mundaneum) — a wing in a government structure in Belgium — to hold their bibliographic card
catalog. It would come to hold millions of cards over the years, was the centerpiece of their
work, and served as a location for their search engine style research service. The Mundaneum
would later receive many setbacks, relocations, and attacks, but in the early part of the 1910s, it
was a recognition of Otlet and La Fontaine’s contribution to information science.
By this time, Otlet’s father had died leaving financial chaos for his family and his
marriage had ended in divorce. Otlet then married Cato Van Nederhesselt, who was as devoted
to his work as he was (Rayward, 1975). However, Otlet’s greatest upheaval came during World
War I: Not only were he and La Fontaine anguished by the violence, but Otlet also lost his
youngest son, Jean, in the 1914 Battle of Yser. Otlet desperately searched for any word about
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Jean for many years, and was crushed to eventually receive confirmation that he had been killed
in battle (Wright, 2014). Otlet published the essay The End of War in which he pleaded for
peace. He and his wife left occupied Belgium for England, America, and Switzerland, and were
branded dangerous pacifists by the French. Otlet argued he was not a pacifist, but an
internationalist who wanted long-term peace based on enlightenment, not short-term solutions to
war (Wright, 2014).
After the war, Otlet was middle aged and struggled to
recover from his personal and professional setbacks, as well as
the pain caused by the rise of nationalism in Europe which
distressed him greatly. His influence was waning and in 1923 he
was told to clear out some of the Palais Mondial to make room
for a fair celebrating rubber. Though he put up a fight and
refused as long as he could, the government sent agents to storm
the building and they destroyed many of his collections (Wright,
2014). What was left was rehoused into other rooms, but in
1934 the Belgian government closed the Palais Mondial for
good. Otlet, distressed, moved his offices to his home and began
to retreat. There were plans to build a grand Mundaneum in
Geneva, that got as far as design, which included using the globe as a feature of the design to
symbolize Otlet’s dream of world unity and cooperation (Rayward, 2017). However, the new
Mundaneum was never built. After the closure, Otlet’s millions of records were left unattended
and decaying (Rayward, 1975). When war broke out once again, the Nazi Rosenberg Taskforce,
designed to take or destroy cultural items, met Otlet at the door to the Mundaneum. Despite
Figure 3. Otlet in an office built at his home following the closure of the Palais Mondial (1937). Released by the Mundaneum. Public domain. Retrieved from WikiCommons.
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Otlet’s unanswered pleas to Franklin D. Roosevelt for help, offering to give the United States the
entire collection, and even his appeal to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis saw his collections as rubbish
(Wright, 2014). Otlet’s life’s work was systematically destroyed, trashed, and dumped around
the city. Once more, a break in peace had taken something irreplaceable from Otlet.
Otlet’s wife, thus far as dedicated to his work as he was, had become frustrated at his
failed attempts to bring life back to Mundaeum over the years before the war, and now gave him
an ultimatum: her or the Mundaeum. Otlet, aging and defeated, chose his wife. He wrote of her
unwavering dedication to him and his collaboration with La Fontaine, and reflected on her life
with him: “I cannot ask her to exceed the limits of good will. I have imposed an unbearable life
on her for too long… (she has) become indifferent to the work, to my work.” (Rayward, 1975, p.
360). Though he never held out hope for a miraculous rebirth of his Mundaneum and his
cataloging system, it did not happen.
In 1943, La Fontaine died. Though the men were no longer actively working together,
they remained in constant contact their entire lives. The death pained Otlet greatly, and, the
following year in December 1944, Otlet passed away.
When considering Otlet’s legacy, Cibangu and Hepworth (2015) wrote in their article
What ICT4D and Information Management Researchers can Learn from Paul Otlet’s Notion of
Development, “It is not uncommon to see the legacy of Otlet as being under appreciated.” (p.
1642). Indeed, for many years, Otlet was overlooked as a father of information science and his
visions of a networked future were forgotten. However, thanks to the efforts of various scholars
like biographer Warden Boyd Rayward and companies like Google, which pledged to support
the Mundaneum in 2012 in honor of Otlet’s contributions to a networked information system,
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Otlet’s name has once more risen to prominence. Today, the Mundaneum is opened once more in
Mons, Belgium.
The influence of Otlet’s work is felt today in school and public libraries from the
traditional card catalog system (now digitzed), the continued use of the UDC, and the inclusion
of the work stations he predicted where patrons can access all the information records they need
on one screen. Otlet’s desire that streamlined information retrieval could lead to world peace
may not have come to fruition, but his revolutionary vision of a one-world collaborative
information network most certainly has.
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References
Cibangu, S. K. and Hepworth, M. (2015). What ICT4D and information management researchers
can learn from Paul Otlet’s notion of development. Information Development, 32(5),
1639–1656. Doi: 10.1177/0266666915618440.
Day, R. E. (2014). Indexing it all: The subject in the age of documentation, information, and
data. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Figure 1. Henri La Fontaine (1914). Released in conjunction with the Nobel Peace Prize. Public
domain. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HenriLaFontaine.jpg
Figure 2. Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and Mathilde Lhoest, his wife, outside the gates of
Palais Mondial (1930). Released by the Mundaneum. Public domain. Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Otlet_et_Henri_La_Fontaine_devant_les_
portes_du_Palais_Mondial.jpg#/
Figure 3. Otlet in an office built at his home following the closure of the Palais Mondial (1937).
Released by the Mundaneum. Public domain. Retrieved from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Otlet_
%C3%A0_son_bureau_(cropped).jpg
Hahn, T.B. and Buckland, M. (Eds.) (1998). Historical studies in information science. Medford,
New Jersey: Information Today, Inc.
Manfroid, S. and Gillen, J. (2013). The archives of Paul Otlet: Between appreciation and
rediscovery, 1944-2013. Library Trends 62(2), 311-328.
Otlet, P. (1990). International organisation and dissemination of knowledge: Selected essays of
Paul Otlet. Translated by W. B. Rayward. Elsevier for the International Federation of
Documentation.
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Rayward, W. B. (Ed.) (2017). European modernism and the information society: Informing the
present, understanding the past. New York: Routledge.
Rayward, W. B. (1975). The universe of information: the work of Paul Otlet for documentation
and international organisation. Moscow: Published for International Federation for
Documentation (FID) by All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
(VINITI).
Wright, A. (2014). Cataloging the World — Paul Otlet and the birth of the information age. New
York: Oxford University Press.
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Appendix A
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Appendix B
Paul Otlet Abridged Bibliography
Otlet, P. (1888). L’afrique aux noirs. Brussels: Ferdinand Larcier.
Otlet, P. (1914). La fin de la guerre. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Otlet, P. (1924). Conférences des associations internationales. Brussels: UIA.
Otlet, P. (1926). L’Education et les instituts du palais mondial. Brussels: UIA.
Otlet, P. (1934). Traité de documentation. Brussels: Mandaneum.
Otlet, P. (1935). Monde, essai d'universalisme. Brussels: Mandaneum.
Otlet, P. (1935). Plan Belgique. Brussels: Mandaneum.
Otlet, P. (1990). International organisation and dissemination of knowledge: Selected essays of
Paul Otlet. Translated by W. B. Rayward. Elsevier for the International Federation of
Documentation.
Appendix C
Reference Interview Chat with Greg Hardin
In a recorded online video chat from 2015, University of North Texas’ Information Literacy
Coordinator Greg Hardin gave a detailed walkthrough of how students can best utilize the search
functions of the university’s library website. Hardin included information about accessing results
using a VPN to avoid firewall issues, long-distance loans, and using RefWorks to save results the
patron may need again.
Hardin gave the code phrase “I don’t know”. The APA style PowerPoints code words
were “APA sample paper”, “reference”, and “figures”.
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