O
OTLET, PAUL
In the pedestrianised centre of the fortified city of Mons, western Belgium, lies the Mundaneum, a monument to a valiant dream. It consists of three floors of plans, photographs, a large globe, a reproduction of a ‘multimedia’ desk known as the Mondothéque, and tall banks of wooden filing cabinets, beautiful in their worn patina and gentle disrepair – the physical remains of what its founder hoped would be ‘an encyclopaedic synthesis … embracing everything we know’. Today it is a popular tourist attraction, and it was particularly popular during 2015, when Mons was the European Capital of Culture, and the curators popularised the notion that the Mundaneum was ‘like Google, but on paper’.
One walks around in ceremonial reverence; you may feel you are performing an autopsy on a brain. The items displayed here were originally designed as both a conceptual and practical factory of knowledge compression, formed from a belief that traditional printed encyclopaedias had run their course, and that new electric communications systems should now bring the greatest knowledge to the greatest number of people, not least those who were responsible enough to act magnanimously with it. Its founders were Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, two bespectacled bibliophiles with earnest demeanours and serious facial hair, Fontaine born in 1854, Otlet in 1868, each committed to the pursuit of peace and the rights of women, and both intrigued by the possibilities of creating something even the most intoxicated editor of Britannica would never dare envisage – a complete catalogue of the world.*
The pair met in the early 1890s while assisting on the compilation of the definitive book of Belgian jurisprudence. But like an encyclopaedia, a definitive book of law would only remain so until the law changed. Otlet and La Fontaine were fascinated by what they saw as a formidable increase in the flow of information in all spheres of their lives, not least the new technological advances in production and transport, and their attendant philosophical theories about where they would lead. They saw the possibilities of global communication – the world expanding and shrinking simultaneously. And rather than being daunted by this inexorable expansion, they were excited by the potential to contain it. Summarising his thinking in later years, Otlet spoke of the need for new instruments to comprehend humanity, ‘or the intellect will never know how to overcome the difficulties which overwhelm it, nor realise the progress that it glimpses and to which it aspires.’
The earliest and grandest public demonstration of this thinking was unveiled, to some scoffing, at the Paris Expo of 1900. Belgium once had an expanding and intimidating Victorian empire, not to say a grimly exploitative one, and now was the time to bring all its fragmented colonial knowledge home on clean white card. The Expo was, after all, a good place for nationalistic boasting, and the stands that attracted the most attention were the ones with the greatest novelty. Otlet and La Fontaine certainly had that.*
They told everyone they met that even the best encyclopaedias had their limitations, for they were part of an old order. They were cumbersome to update, and despite the best attempts of the smartest editors, it was almost impossible to make meaningful connections between topics or theories. But now there was a new way. La Fontaine and Otlet, accompanied by Leonie La Fontaine, Henri’s sister, would attempt to incorporate the best encyclopaedic principles with new communications technologies and global change. Not a minor quest, clearly – more like slaying a dragon. And it wasn’t an ambition even the most far-thinking print encyclopaedists would dare to entertain.
Their earliest physical manifestation of this was called Repertoire Bibliographique Universel, and today it might strike us as both quaint and overly familiar, for the original (c.1895) resembled – in fact was – a stocky wooden filing cabinet divided into seventy-two small trays, each with a metal handle and a slot for a removable label. A visitor in a hurry might have thought they were promoting office furniture.*
To Otlet and the La Fontaines the filing cabinet more closely resembled a bank vault, each tray a safe deposit box. For here were the connections between all the publications in the world, or at least their beginnings. The indexing was based on Melvil Dewey’s American library decimal classification system of 1876, although Otlet and La Fontaine would soon come to see it as too limited for their needs.
They divided their topics in ways that would not have been unfamiliar to Ephraim Chambers compiling his Cyclopaedia in the 1720s. They used Dewey’s ten category ‘schedules’: 0 – Generalities; 1 – Philosophy and Psychology; 2 – Religion and Theology; 3 – Social Sciences; 4 – [Vacant]; 5 – Natural Sciences and Mathematics; 6 – Technology; 7 – The Arts; 8 – Language, Linguistics and Literature; 9 – Geography, Biography and History. The vacancy at 4 (achieved by combining Language and Literature) was an attempt at future-proofing, making space for an exciting new subject matter in the years to come. The new system also eliminated the Decimal from Dewey Decimal, enabling a more fluid interplay of relationships between topics: 51+53, for example, would connect mathematics and chemistry, while 63:30 would suggest statistics relating to agriculture.*
Behind this lay a system of what Alex Wright calls ‘brute-force indexing’, a hard-hatted method of categorising all human knowledge into four elements: facts; interpretation of facts; statistics; and sources. This sidelined creativity in favour of essential gutting. ‘The ideal,’ according to Otlet, ‘would be to strip each article or each chapter in a book of whatever is a matter of fine language or repetition or padding and to collect separately on cards whatever is new and adds to knowledge.’ Otlet is pre-empting the modern computer search engine. As Wright observes, ‘Umberto Eco’s distinction between “books to be read” and “books to be consulted” seems relevant.’
By the end of 1895, the Belgians had already amassed more than 400,000 entries in their catalogue, growing to 1.5 million at the end of 1897. By the time they presented their ideas at the Paris Expo in a series of lectures and displays, the figure stood close to 3 million, and they had received royal approval for the establishment of their Office of International Bibliography. Henri La Fontaine classified his aims as ‘nothing less than a question of creating a world depot, where all human ideas can be automatically stored in order to be spread afterwards among people with a minimum of effort and a maximum of effectiveness’. Paul Otlet hoped to copy his card bibliography for distribution to leading libraries throughout the world, and hoped for reciprocal input as a result. Not for the first time, ambition was thwarted by the limitations of technology: rather than replicate their card system, the Belgians were obliged to reverse-compile it back into a very fat book, and then encourage recipients to cut out the strips of information on each page and stick them to cards themselves. (The book wasn’t an encyclopaedia; it was rather information about where information could be obtained.)
Otlet and La Fontaine were dismissed in the Belgian press as ‘solemn fools’ wishing to turn a whole pulsating city into cards. But Otlet in particular seemed inured to ridicule, and swiftly expanded his thinking into many areas beyond the index card, all of them optimistic, some of them hubristic, others conceivably torn from the pages of Amazing Stories magazine. He was driven by the death of his son in the last year of the Great War, and he often declared that only by the global sharing of information could future conflict be averted. He was involved with the founding of the League of Nations, and resolved to devote his life to the formation of ‘a great human city, completely devoted to Peace’.
We are fortunate to still have access to the vast amount of the visual demonstration material that Otlet and La Fontaine created in the course of their fifty-year passion (not to mention the index cards a visitor may peruse freely in their filing cabinets). Some of the graphic posters resemble vast and complex pyramids with tiny writing and lots of arrows, others seem to anticipate the pictorial spreads in a Dorling Kindersley book. A geopolitical atlas on boards takes its place next to a sketch of an ideal international museum, while a chart delineating the governing structure of the Union of International Associations hangs near a three-dimensional plan of the ideal ‘classification and presentation of didactic material’. For years these items were gathered at the opulent Palais Mondial in Brussels, but when they were ignominiously displaced by a rubber trade fair in 1923, Otlet was forced to store them in a variety of unsuitable locations, including his home and the basements of buildings throughout Belgium. Only in 1998, fifty-four years after his death, did they take their permanent and honoured place at the new Mundaneum in Mons.
What did the traditional encyclopaedists make of all this? Not much. They certainly didn’t appear to be threatened by Otlet and La Fontaine’s new systems; most editors seemed too busy updating their editions. But the remnants in Mons are deeply prescient. Paul Otlet in particular was grasping towards a future of hyperlinked information retrieval. Inevitably one thinks of the Internet, although Otlet’s vision was primarily tempered by a philanthropic and political liberalism. As his biographer Alex Wright concludes, his tireless endeavours are important ‘not just as a kind of historical curio, but because he envisioned a radically different kind of network: one driven not by corporate profit and personal vanity, but by a utopian vision of intellectual progress, social egalitarianism and even spiritual liberation.’
That was the future, then. Its zenith, during the last summer before the war seemed inevitable, occurred at a gathering at the Trocadéro in Paris in August 1937. It is not unusual for today’s historians of technology to look back at that five-day conference as the dawn of the Information Age, although back then it was just the plain old World Congress of Universal Documentation. Delegates from forty-five countries discussed acquisition, retrieval and storage, all the librarian’s favourites, and there was a particular focus on the exciting potential of microfilm. Paul Otlet spoke again on his big subject, the potential of emergent technologies to benefit the scholarly exchange of information and, by implication, a peaceable global government – a United Nations before its time. Not everyone at the conference had such generous internationalist plans: a German delegation delivered a speech ominously titled ‘The Domination of Knowledge’.
Other speakers included H.G. Wells, who had his own last-days-of-empire vision of how the world’s knowledge might be colonised and controlled. Like Paul Otlet, the author believed that the answer lay in a universal network; knowledge alone, if properly organised and disseminated, could still save the world from itself.