» Paul Otlet - Long Views: The Long Now Blog

Paul Otlet

August 22nd, 02007 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y]
Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundameum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)

The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet.
In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their
bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then
figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links”
and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the
Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way
until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an
astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen
sysem worked . – Stewart Brand on Alex Wright

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 02007 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Peter Wilson

How is it that the Long Now Foundation is not already working with the Union of International Associations, an organization established by Paul Otlet and his collaborator Henri La Fontaine?

With its groundbreaking work on the Encyclopedia of World Problems & Human Potential and the Yearbook of International Organizations I would have thought they were well known to Mr Brand et al.