Pursue your dream--and never accept a proven solution! This is ... Paul Otlet
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Transcript of Pursue your dream--and never accept a proven solution! This is ... Paul Otlet
This is
Paul OtletImage credit: flickr.com/marcwathieu/4421630189
He wanted to collect and
organize Image copyright: Unknown
the World’s Knowledge
Formally stated: “Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one of several people who has been considered the father of
modern InformationSciencea field he himself called documentation.”
This and the following citations: wikipedia.org
So what?
Image credit: flickr.com/george_eastman_house/4420695962 Disclaimer: This is not Paul Otlet!
Born on August 23,
1868 in Brussels, Belgium, as
the oldest child to
Image credit: flickr.com/statelibraryofnsw/2964804829
a wealthy businessman who made his fortune
selling
Trams around the world
His mother died at age 24 when Otlet
was three
His father kept him out of school, he had—as a child—few friends, and he soon developed a love of reading and
Image credit: flickr.com/cornelluniversitylibrary/3610752603
Books
Image credit: flickr.com/benchilada/2466968689
Image credit: flickr.com/candiedwomanire/1651870
Books—the accepted and proven storage medium for the
World’s Knowledge
in 1892
An accepted solution.But really an adequate storage medium?
Think about it!
How could you possibly find a book you needed?
There are a few physical instancesof the book
in libraries
somewhere on this planet
Image credit: flickr.com/gadl/3907891398
To complicate things further
“Books are an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them is an arbitrary decision on the part of the author's, making individual facts
difficult to locate”
Image credit: flickr.com/horiavarlan/4263326117
“A better storage system”, Otlet wrote in his first essay in 1892,
“would be cards containing individual ‘chunks’ of information”
Image credit: flickr.com/deano/2865863332
Those chunks would allow “all the manipulations of classification and continuous
interfiling”
Inter-what?
interfiling
Image credit: flickr.com/amattox/3207213522
A Web
Cut.
Already in 1891, Otlet
had met Henri La Fontaine
Image credit: flickr.com/peacepalacelibrary/3095591442
He quit his job as a lawyer and the two men founded the
Universal Bibliographic Repertory—
Image credit: UnknownDisclaimer: This was not Paul’s and Henri’s garage!
a collection of index cards that, by the end of 1895, had grown to 400,000 entries; later it
would reach a height of over 15 million
With capital from the Belgium Society of Social and Political Sciences, a fee-based search service, and La
Fontaine’s Nobel Peace Price winnings, the startup endured until it hit the ceiling of World War I
Image credit: flickr.com/nlscotland/3011962527
After 1919, the two men restarted, relaunched, and rebranded the Repertory
twice as the World Palace and the
Mundaneum, continuing on government
funding, hiring staff, accumulating 15 million
index cards,
drowning in paper, of course
experimenting with new media as well
Image credit: flickr.com/mburpee/2589663547
but being forced to close the shop when Belgium government cut off funding in 1934—
World War II shuttered what was left.
Otlet died in 1944,fading into oblivion
long before Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Larry & Sergey would enter the scene.
Sad story?
Well.Lessons to be learned:
1
Quit your job as a lawyer!
2
Pursue your dream!
3
And never accept a proven solution.
felgner.ch
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