Web viewInspired by the DDC, ... which was similar to Dewey’s efforts in that it was broken into ten ... Otlet desperately searched for any word about Jean for

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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SEEKING INTERNATIONAL UNITY THROUGH INFORMATION

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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Documents

Web viewInspired by the DDC, ... which was similar to Dewey’s efforts in that it was broken into ten ... Otlet desperately searched for any word about Jean for