Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

by Alex Wright

The dream of universal knowledge hardly started with the digital age. From the archives of Sumeria to the Library of Alexandria, humanity has long wrestled with information overload and management of intellectual output. Revived during the Renaissance and picking up pace in the Enlightenment, the dream grew and by the late nineteenth century was embraced by a number of visionaries who felt that at long last it was within their grasp.
Among them, Paul Otlet stands out. A librarian by training, he worked at expanding the potential of the catalogue card -- the world's first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and reading rooms, connecting his native Belgium to the world -- by means of vast collections of cards that brought together everything that had ever been put to paper. Recognizing that the rapid acceleration of technology was transforming the world's intellectual landscape, Otlet devoted himself to creating a universal bibliography of all published knowledge. Ultimately totaling more than 12 million individual entries, it would evolve into the Mundaneum, a vast "city of knowledge" that opened its doors to the public in 1921. By 1934, Otlet had drawn up plans for a network of "electric telescopes" that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed a reseau mondial: a worldwide web. It all seemed possible, almost until the moment when the Nazis marched into Brussels and carted it all away.
In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright places Otlet in the long continuum of visionaries and pioneers who have dreamed of unifying the world's knowledge, from H.G. Wells and Melvil Dewey to Ted Nelson and Steve Jobs. And while history has passed Otlet by, Wright shows that his legacy persists in today's networked age, where Internet corporations like Google and Twitter play much the same role that Otlet envisioned for the Mundaneum -- as the gathering and distribution channels for the world's intellectual output. In this sense, Cataloging the World is more than just the story of a failed entrepreneur; it is an ongoing story of a powerful idea that has captivated humanity from time immemorial, and that continues to inspire many of us in today's digital age.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Library Science, Technology, Information Science, Books About Books

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Alex Wright is a Brooklyn-based writer, researcher, and designer whose most recent book is Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. His first book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots."

Alex's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Believer, Salon.com, The Wilson Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, and Harvard Magazine, among others.

Alex is a graduate faculty member at the School of Visual Arts' MFA program in Interaction Design. From 2009-2013, he was the Director of User Experience at The New York Times. He has also led research and design projects for Etsy, Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby, Cool Site of the Year, and an American Graphic Design Award.

Although painfully aware that the last thing the world needs is another bearded, bespectacled Brooklyn writer, Alex nonetheless chooses to live in Park Slope with his wife, two boys, and three banjos.

Reviews

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an Advance Reader's Copy of this book on Netgalley.

I thought myself decently well-versed in the history of library science until I read this book, when I realized I was only decently well-versed in the history of American library science. It was very interesting to read about what was happening on the other side of the pond while Dewey was creating the American Library Association and Andrew Carnegie was putting a public library in every city that wanted one. I knew nothing about Paul Otlet other than his name, even though my library school alma mater has started a lecture series in his honor.

The book is very well researched and written, full of illustrations, and should appeal to both academics and casual-advanced readers. It outlines some cataloging and classification work that was rather ahead of its time, it's also a classic tale of what happens to genius when it's too scattered. Unfortunately the middle dragged quite a bit, which is why it took me so long to read this. I had to skim through most of the middle to escape. I wasn't particularly interested in the crazy dream projects that people Otlet partnered with were working on, and I wasn't very interested in the inter-war bureaucratic kerfuffling that slowly killed his work. The beginning and the end of the book are the most interesting points in this story, the creation of Otlet's ideas, and then their relevance in the modern day and comparisons to the modern Internet.

I also would have appreciated more discussion on the differing motivations behind library science in America and Europe, especially since Otlet tried to work with Dewey early on and largely failed. Both sides were almost entirely motivated by Progressivism, but the flavors are somewhat different. The American library movement was more animated by the plight of The Poor and what libraries could do for them, Carnegie's "swimming tenth." The library movement very much fits in with the zeitgeist of that period in American history. Its history is also very co-ed, studded with driven do-gooder women like Mary Eileen Ahern and Katharine Sharp. Paul Otlet's animating force, in contrast, appears to be primarily towards supporting the work of academics, with some perhaps trickle down affect to improve the lives of others. Women are more or less absent in Otlet's story.

I've definitely got a new place to visit on my bucket list though, really must get to Belgium.

[Brandon · Rating 4 out of 5]

While much has been written about the birth of the Information Age in general, and the genesis and growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular, the histories tend to center on the contributions of English-speakers working in and around the field of computer science. However, in his latest book Alex Wright attempts to correct, or rather expand upon, the historical record, by shining a light on the little-known figure of Paul Otlet, an early twentieth-century Belgian cataloger whose grandiose visions of world peace and spiritual enlightenment impelled him to initiate a number of utopian projects, most notably a worldwide network for organizing and disseminating all human knowledge—an idea all the more impressive as it prefigures the personal computer and the Internet by several decades. In a 1930s treatise entitled "World," Otlet describes the ethereal goal he was striving towards:

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a
distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be
established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able
to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual
screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate
creation, in whole or in certain parts.

As prescient as Otlet’s dream would later prove, Wright is not arguing that Otlet “invented” the Internet. Indeed, Wright takes special care to highlight the many ways Otlet’s rough sketch differs from today’s information superhighway. What he is arguing instead is that Otlet, as well as certain artists, writers and thinkers of his time, represents a specific cultural, political and economic milieu, which in its struggles to contend with rapid technological advancements and a surfeit of intellectual output, provides the much-needed context for understanding the birth of the Information Age.

Alex Wright is a professor at the School of Visual Arts and head of user experience research at Etsy. Besides being a regular contributor to The New York Times, he is the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. Having seemingly grown out of this book is his latest fare, Cataloging the World, which frames the life and career of Paul Otlet within the tumult of fin de siècle Europe.

This endlessly fascinating and eminently readable history is comprised of an introduction, twelve chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction grabs the reader right away by starting at the end of Otlet’s life, with a description of the invading Nazi army’s seizure of the Palais Mondial, which housed his Universal Bibliography, a card catalog at one time boasting 15 million entries. Otlet had also amassed a collection of documents and cultural ephemera, held in over 70,000 cardboard boxes, much of which the Nazis destroyed.

Chapter 1, “The Libraries of Babel,” charts the evolution of thinking about knowledge organization, starting in the sixteenth century with Conrad Gessner, author of the Bibliotheca Universalis; going through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Francis Bacon’s Arrangement and General Survey of Knowledge and Denis Diderot’s encyclopedia; and finally ending in the nineteenth century with Melvil Dewey’s eponymous classification scheme.

Chapter 2, “The Dream of the Labyrinth,” discusses the Otlet family. Paul’s father was a businessman who had stakes in Belgium’s colonial enterprises in Africa, which were marketed to the Belgian people and to the world as benevolent in nature, but which turned out to be a murderous and exploitative grab for power and wealth. The young and idealistic Paul, however, influenced by the Positivism of Auguste Comte, bought into the humanitarian propaganda and for the rest of his life would work towards furthering the “evolution” of mankind.

Chapter 3, “Belle Epoque,” considers the other major influences on Paul Otlet’s thinking, namely, the internationalism and technological optimism in the air at the time—best exemplified by the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, at which, incidentally, Otlet and his partner Henri La Fontane displayed the beginnings of their Universal Bibliography. The chapter also explains Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), a cataloging system designed by Otlet to allow for semantic linkages between multiple topics.

Chapters 4-10 cover the many other utopian projects Otlet worked on (with varying degrees of success) during his long and prolific career. Highlights include: the Universal Repertory of Documentation, a catalog providing metadata for all the documents generated by the governments, universities, institutions and organizations of the world; the International Museum, a spatial representation of the span and breadth of human progress, from the beginnings of civilization to the modern day; the World City, a kind of global capital, which would be the home of an international governing body, as well as the center of all human endeavor, from the arts and sciences to athletics and industry; and the Mundaneum, a synthesis of human knowledge, facilitated by a vast bureaucracy headquartered in the World City, and disseminated by telecommunications technologies to end-users across the globe, who would be able to access the information using the Mondotheque, Otlet’s analog version of a PC workstation. Needless to say, most of these projects never progressed farther than the conceptual stage. They did, however, influence the thinking of others, while his more practical pursuits, such as the UDC and his theorizing about documentation, made a lasting impact on the field of information science.

The final two chapters pick up where most popular histories of the Information Age start off: with Vannevar Bush and his seminal 1945 essay, “As We May Think.” Then comes the recital of the familiar litany of luminaries: J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Tim Berners-Lee, etc. The book concludes by arguing for Otlet’s relevance today.

Wright for the most part succeeds in what he sets out to do, namely, to take an obscure figure from the annals of information science and position him in a place of prominence among the “big names” in the history of the Information Age. The case for doing so is strong. Although living in a time in which the index card was still cutting edge technology, Paul Otlet managed to dream up inventions uncannily similar to the Internet and the personal computer. Not only that, in his writings he anticipated such things as hypertext, social networking, and keyword searching. Even from this all-too-brief highlight reel of his work, it is clear that a history of the Information Age without Otlet would be incomplete.

Yet, despite Otlet’s obvious importance, Wright does not make the mistake of creating yet another god for the pantheon. While including Otlet among the “big names,” his is not the kind of history in which larger-than-life individuals single-handedly smash conventions and shift paradigms. Indeed, much to his credit, Wright avoids the lone genius myth by hewing close to the facts, which, in the end, tell the story of how the incremental work of many people, in different fields and in different parts of the world, paved the way to a new human epoch.

Deflating the “Da Vincis, Brunos, Galileos, and Copernicuses,” of course, isn’t done for its own sake, though. Wright does this with an aim to contextualizing history. Otlet, he shows us time and again, did not think and act in a vacuum; rather, he was shaped as much by cultural, political, and economic forces as by his own personal predilections. For example, Wright does an excellent job of connecting Otlet’s philosophically-fraught altruism to the humanitarian rhetoric belying Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo. He also intimates (though I wish he would have made explicit) that it was the great wealth extracted from its African colony which enabled Belgium to fund its domestic projects, including Otlet’s brainchild, the Palais Mondial.

Because of Wright’s careful and conscientious approach to the material, his book manages to avoid the pitfalls of popular histories. All pitfalls, I should say, except for one. But this, I suspect, has less to do with Wright than with the limitations of the genre. Let me explain. A history that is to have an appeal outside of academic circles has to meet certain criteria. If it is about a person, that person must be presented in a positive light--if at all possible as a heroic figure, or at the very least, an admirable one. And no matter what that person’s failings—personal or professional—the narrative must have an optimistic bent. Otherwise, I’m assuming, publishers don’t think the public will find it palatable. Again, Wright’s portrayal of Otlet as a human being, warts and all, and not as prophet or hero, is commendable. As is his efforts to ground Otlet in a specific time and place, and not have him floating above history, as it were, acting on it without being touched by it. But I’m afraid the commercial imperative to balance the scales may have meant that Otlet’s more unsavory qualities, while acknowledged and dealt with in the text, were not properly weighted. In a word, I don’t think Wright was hard enough on Otlet—or on the time period he was a product of.

It was a time period, let’s remember, that gave us colonialism, two world wars, and the Holocaust. Ostensibly, Otlet as an advocate for peace and unity represents the road not taken, the prophet unheeded. But Wright, for all his emphasis on contextualizing, should have made more apparent how the same dark forces that led to those disastrous events also informed Otlet’s historically-specific brand of humanitarianism. True enough, he was for peace and unity--but peace on the terms of the global ruling class (white, bourgeoisie), and unity implemented by top-heavy bureaucratic institutions, to the detriment of the individual. I don’t think I’m making too much of a leap when I say that in his racial politics we find a harbinger of German fascism; and in his zeal for collectivism, the first hints of Soviet communism. Of course, he was neither a fascist nor a communist, but merely of his time; this fact, though, should not excuse him. At several points in his career, when the circumstances called for some honest soul-searching, he doubled-down and blindly barreled ahead—and much of the world did the same. Perhaps with a bit more self-reflection and self-criticism, Otlet’s time could have turned out a lot less bloody….

Then again, perhaps this applies to all of history.

However, notwithstanding Wright’s error in proportion, which when put under a microscope, appears much larger than it actually is, I would enthusiastically recommend his book to my fellow colleagues in the library and information science fields. What drew me to the work initially was Otlet’s name; I had heard it once in a library science class, and though little was said about him, I was intrigued--the reason being that this cataloger was mentioned in a genealogy that led directly to the digital age. As a soon-to-be librarian, who secretly despaired that my future colleagues and I were going the way of the Cro-Magnon, while the computer scientists inherited the earth, the revelation of Otlet’s place in history hit me like a bolt of lightning. Librarians are not relics of a bygone era, I realized; they were at the vanguard of the Information Age, and still have a place in it today. This is a message I know a lot of information professionals would like to hear, and it is a message that Cataloging the World delivers.

[lids :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

if i showed this guy a MARC record i think he would explode. it rocks to read books about the birth of the information age that talk about library science instead of just computer science

[Ameya Warde · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was SO INTERESTING! I had never heard of Paul Otlet, and didn't know anything at all about the history of Library Science before picking this up, but I'm so glad I did. I wish I had remembered to review this right after I finished it so I could have more intelligent things to say about it, but alas. It's 2 months later, and I don't remember enough to write a good review, but I do know that this book was super interesting and pleasing to my extremely nerdy self. :)

[Janday · Rating 3 out of 5]

originally published on BookPeople's blog.

Alex Wright channels his inner James Gleick here and offers us a compelling biography, not only of an important forerunner to information science, but a brief biography of the birth of the Web and information science itself.

In my years in library school, I never even heard of Paul Otlet, yet he was a man who envisioned a network of organized information similar to what information scientists are working on to this day. Otlet was an idealist who subscribed to the ideas of positivism: mainly, that society operates on a series of laws, just as the physical world does. These laws are derived from empirical knowledge (evidence). Access to knowledge is imperative for humanity to advance. Among his accomplishments, he developed the concept of “documentation,” standardized microfiche, conceptualized the League of Nations.

Otlet wasn’t the first librarian whose goals included cataloging all the world’s knowledge into accessible formats. As Wright says, “Utopian dreams are often an occupational hazard for librarians.” That simple statement describes Otlet and his story to a T. Otlet developed Universal Decimal Classification which allowed for relational classification that was more similar to the Semantic Web’s RDF framework than to Dewey’s Decimal Classification. Otlet’s life’s work was to create a network of information that was connected through knowledge nodes. Humanity (today we call them “users”) would make a request (query) and receive (retrieve) accurate knowledge (data/results) through a combination of telephone (dial-up) and microfilmed documents (pages).”

This is where the similarities to the Web, as we know it today, end. In fact, no one could have predicted the way the Web looks like today. Otlet’s network and accompanying ontology, as he envisioned it, he called the Mundaneum, and it operated under a central, international authority–or it would, if any international authority adopted it. Our Web has no hierarchical structure curated by a central authority. (No, Google is not the central authority for the Web). And in a way, that’s good because some proposed classification schemes for the Web border on the arcane and imperialistic. On the Web, all data is equal. (Thanks, hippies.) On the other hand, we are looking down the halfpipe at the “Data Deluge,” the “Digital Dark Age,” or what information pioneer Ted Nelson describes as “a nightmare honkytonk, noisy and colorful and wholly misbegotten.” We can all agree that the Web is a knowledge management hellscape, right?

Otlet, this pioneer and visionary, ended up facing down Nazis and watching helplessly as they burned his library and dispersed his collection. And yet, his work lives on. Otlet had followers and intellectual descendents. They kept of some of his card catalog and still work to preserve his world brain on mundaneum.org/en. And good thing, too. Because I know my education is not complete. No one’s is. As long as there is information, there will be a need for it. Otlet not only recognized the need (although his attitudes towards exactly who would use his Mundaneum are unclear), he helped nurture the idea that would become almost a value of our times: that we are ENTITLED to information.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book about a mostly forgotten figure in the history of information sciences. The book does not focus so much on Paul Otlet the person, but much more on his ideas, their philosophical underpinnings, and their historical context. Another strength of the book is that it constantly builds links with the work and philosophical thinking of other information age pioneers of his age and contrasts Otlet's ideas with today's reality of the world wide web. I would say though that it is a fairly specialised and 'dry' book, so maybe only of interest to those that are interested in the topic of knowledge organisation and library studies.

[Elsbeth Kwant]

Though an interesting read, the link with Paul Otlet is sometimes quite far off. An interesting other take on the history of the information age - not through Lady Lovelace and Turing, but via the organisation of information. Of which the Mundaneum of course, is a dapper example. The tendency of librarians to try to make the world's information useful is well described.

[malrubius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kindle version is already available. Fascinating story of social scientist Otlet's attempt to gather all the world's information in one place. Well-written and compelling narrative brings Otlet, his world, and his struggles to life.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book tries very hard to turn Paul Otlet into one of the visionaries of the Information Age, and I think that the link is somewhat strained. Otlet, born in Belgium ca. 1863, seems to have been one of those ambitious, but essentially philanthropic and optimist (or "positivist") cranks of the late Victorian age, closer to Darwin than to Freud. His original ambition was to collect, classify and organize all of the world's books into a huge bibliography, but soon he left that dream behind to have successively more ambitious schemes. A museum of the world "Mundaneum", a city of mankind, that type of thing. All of these plans were born out of a sincere conviction that such organization would be good for mankind and eventually, through the promotion of mutual understanding and collaboration, guarantee world peace. Coming from a man who truly believed, or at least tried to convince himself, that King Leopold II's colonial excesses in the Congo were motivated by a humanistic belief to improve the lot of the natives, this does sound like jaw-dropping naivete. But there was a general spirit of internationalism in the air (think of all the international foundations that were founded in those days), and for some time, Paul Otlet and his politically more astute friend, Peace Prize Nobel Laureate La Fontaine, obtained funding and support for their plans. Then King Leopold II died and WWI killed not just Paul Otlet's son but many of his ambitions. But he plugged on, briefly linking up with a second-rate sculptor who would be the main architect of the City of the World. Then WWII broke out and the Nazis carried off whatever was left of value.

I had higher hopes for this book, but it was just too vague, too abstract for me. All of these schemes for international peace seemed so naive, so farfetched to me, that I had trouble keeping them apart. I found the transition to the discussion of the pioneers of the early internet abrupt and confusing. As far as I could see, the author feels that Otlet belongs in that company because he had a general concept of making knowledge available to the larger public, and had even sketched out a diagram whereby researchers could use some type of telescope to read books in other locations- an early conceptual scheme of screens and the internet? I didn't quite buy it.

[John Ohno · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lucid account of an era in information technology when the dewey decimal system was still in flux and the state of the art was index cards & microfilm, bookended by a brief overview of early rennaisance encyclopedic cataloguing systems on one side & a brief overview of the history of hypertext on the other, all tied together by Paul Otlet, a forgotten figure at the nexus of a social network that includes a nobel peace prize winner, Henry James, Le Corbusier, Woodrow Wilson, W. E. B. DuBois, H. G. Wells, and King Leopold II. Set mostly in the early 20th century, as a flowering of utopian internationalist projects like the development of Esperanto and the formation of the League of Nations gave way to nationalism and war, this is interesting if you're into that period even if bibliography isn't your bag.

The one criticism I have is something the editor should have caught: many sentences are followed by near-identical sentences -- a repetition that's probably the result of stitching together different revisions of the same material. This phenomenon is rare but noticeable.

[Caolan McMahon · Rating 3 out of 5]

He certainly had some over-reaching utopian ideas and pursued them doggedly!

Unfortunately, the book was light on technical detail and, I felt, failed to relate to him personally. The author prefers instead to compare Otlet to his contemporaries, which paints a fascinating picture of the world at the time but leaves Otlet a vacuum in the centre, and compares his ideas to the modern-day internet, which stretches the connection a little thin.

I'd never heard of Paul Otlet before picking up this book, or many of the other people mentioned, and this served as a reasonable introduction to the characters and ideas involved. The early attempts to structure and disseminate the world's information output are fascinating, but be warned, the arguments in this book walk around in circles and the author repeats himself _a lot_. I only suggest you pick this up if you're particularly interested in the topic.

[Sunkuru Sachin Kumar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good work with the biography of the great Paul Otlet with the essence of related history to information age.

After reading the book I realized the amount of work and dedications by our great predecessors for the things now the new generation like us just take in account. Starting from the arrangement of books in library to visualizing the blurred form of the modern internet is what makes people in the book great. We are experiencing not so different yet achievable state of what Paul Otlet has visualized half a century before.

Credit to the author, around the life of Paul Otlet the book has mentions of many of the greats and their works that had their parts for a greater humanity for next generation.

[Philemon Schott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eine Biographie über einen der einflussreichsten Bibliothekare, dessen Namen wir heute vergessen haben. Gut gelungen, da viel auf seine sich stark verändernde Welt eingegangen wird. Entsprechend ist es fast schon mehr eine Geschichte von Informationen an sich und wie seit dem 19. Jahrhundert darüber nachgedacht wurde, wie sie geordnet und zugänglich gemacht werden könnten.

Es werden viele Themen und Kuriositäten ausgeführt oder gestreift, wie z.B. Nazibiliothekare, belgischer Kolonialismus, Positivismus, der Boom der Weltkonferenzen, die Architektur einer Weltstadt, utopischer Internationalismus und Pazifismus, das "Worldbrain" von H.G. Wells, Theosophie und am Ende gibt's eine kurze Geschichte und eine spirituelle Deutung des Internets.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex Wright's recent book on Paul Otlet does a great job of weaving a narrative that includes a broad selection of Information Technology/Information Science History. I thoroughly enjoyed the style of the book and the audible narration struck the right tone. This book is an excellent guide to the connections between present day technologies and debates and those that have come before. If you're an Aubible member, well work the purchase!

[Greg Foster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly dry, but informative. The information landscape as we know it today had a long, winding path. It is definitely interesting to learn that the world wide web had philosophical foundations far-preceding the technological advancements that made it possible around the mid 1900s. It will be interesting to see how linked data and RDF triples develop as time goes on. It is the most promising development in information organization and retrieval thus far.

[Monzenn · Rating 3 out of 5]

High three stars. The subject matter is all right. I can also see the main narrative: here's a forgotten pillar of the digital revolution - sure, he was more of a librarian heavyweight, but his statements were close enough to networks and the Internet, right? I feel like a few of the comparisons were a stretch, especially after his death - there is a reason he is forgotten. Nonetheless I can appreciate the library and classification bits.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enorm boeiend figuur en mooi verhalend opgetekend. De laatste hoofdstukken worden me iets te anachronistisch en gaan met zevenmijlslaarzen door een zeer complexe en moeilijk te volgen geschiedenis heen

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“All links which we establish between objects or ideas bear the mark of subjectivity.” This doesn’t stop humans from trying to organize, classify, and catalog all that we can.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is total nerd-heaven if you are interested in information science and the study of resource management, documentary science and taxonomy, and get a better grip on how mankind has gotten to where we are in the Information Age. Paul Otlet has an incredible story and got a lot of things right, even though he was a staunch liberal, socialist, and positivist.

At his core he saw the fundamental truth that our culture is totally cut off from. He saw that there was an objective truth out there and it could be illuminated by any means: a book, a paragraph, an audio recording, even a napkin. He set out to devise the UDC, an even more complex taxonomy system for documents. His goal was to classify all of knowledge in order to lead the world to truth (a clear look at his positivist worldview).

But he wasn't wrong. Our humanity strains for greater knowledge, greater clarity and greater coordination of truth. We want the whole world to make sense and we want to know how it all works. That's an extremely utopian vision, a vision Christians say, "Oh, yes please!" But then take it the next step and show an even better alternative: that there is an omniscient source of knowledge: A Being who is a personality, and He has made himself known to us--and not just himself but his agenda and purpose for the world as we know it.

Our hearts yearn along with Paul's but instead of developing an exhaustive taxonomy and watching as your utopian vision is dashed to pieces by the evil of Hitler, we look towards the future, a future very very like this one and yet so incredibly different. A future where knowledge comes freely, without error, in an infinite stream of truth. And even more, this knowledge isn't purposeless, it serves as the means of coming to know the omniscient One Himself.

The book was great but the way it made me think about God and the world in which we live was priceless.

[Dani Shuping · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC provided by NetGalley

Since the dawn of time humanity has long wanted to have access to all knowledge across the lands. The Library of Alexandria was an early attempt and it appeared again during the Renaissance and again and again until the late nineteenth century when a number of people finally felt that this monumental task was within their reach. One such person was librarian Paul Otlet. Working from the simple card catalog Paul connected his native Belgium to the world beyond. Otlet created more than 12 million individual entries and more. He created plans for electric telescopes that would allow people to search through items throughout the world that would all be linked together via: a worldwide web. And his dream almost became reality! Until the Nazis arrived and destroyed it.

In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright shines a light on one of the forgotten people of the cataloging world in Otlet. Wright shows that Otlet was not only an equal of Melvil Dewey, but that he was ahead of his time and that modern technologies, such as Google and Twitter, were the stars that he was reaching for. And while this might not sound the like the most exciting book in the world to anyone except librarians, it shows that some aspects of today’s modern world may not have come into being without Otlet. Mitchell has done extensive research to bring Otlet and his mission to life and present it in a tale that is fairly engaging.

This is a rather long book and parts of the middle did drag on a bit, but this is a person that anyone interested in Information Science should read up on. I give the book 3 out of 5 stars.

[Gabriel Avocado · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prior to reading this book, I had no idea how important Otlet was. Wright does a great job of providing enough historical and political contexts, not only during Otlet's life but in the present day. The author walks the reader through every step of the development of Otlet's wildest schemes and puts them in proper contexts. Not only that, I found Wright to be very good at making connections between information scientists like librarians and archivists and with computer scientists, a connection I feel most people fail to see.

This was a rather enjoyable book, if somewhat boring--I personally had a difficult time understanding the relevance of some of Otlet's friends' projects. However, this book goes beyond Otlet himself and provides a clearer image of how the Information Age came to be. I highly recommend it to anyone studying info or computer sciences.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll have to write a better review later... Interesting book about an interesting guy, but definitely loses steam at 55% (I read it on my phone kindle app so no idea what page that translates to). Picks up again briefly from 62-64% or so. It pretty abruptly leaves Otlet's story to talk generally about the development of the web, and while I see how that's related, it feels unstructured and a little out of place next to the more biographical stuff. The author does tie it together later, but I found it tough to get through the last bit of the book. Still worth a read if you're a big library nerd like me.

[Larry Hinman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew a few things about Otlet before I began this book, but Wright's book is a gem that sheds light on a little-known figure who foresaw much of today's World Wide Web, but did so with the mechanical means available at the time (prior to the outbreak of WWII). Outlet's work was part of a larger vision, both epistemological and political: to construct a universal catalogue of knowledge that would be the complement of a universal government (the League of Nations). It's a fascinating study, and Wright is a master at telling it.

[Trevor McGuire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt the subtitle was a bit misleading. This book began like a biography of a tenacious young librarian, but that biography petered out and it became a much drier history of the internet. It would turn out that our protagonist was really just a small cog in a large machine; if he didn't do what he did, someone else would have filled the gap. In short, there were probably many characters in this history that could have been chosen to play the role that Otlet played in this book. I recommend the first half as a biography, but the second half just didn't grab me.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a librarian, I found this book to be extremely interesting. Otlet's hard work has set the stage for future information professionals, and certainly he is responsible for the success of research performed in the early 20th century, due to his work cataloging the worlds knowledge. I found that the book was anything but boring- and I would recommend this to anyone interested in education, library science, history and Archival studies. I particularly recommend it to all MLIS students.

[Jimmy In]

A very interesting book about a Belgian librarian who designed a system for cataloging all the information in the world, on index cards. He also planned a museum that would hold his card catalogs and other cultural artifacts and a "world city" based on his desire for world peace and brotherhood. He was a "positivist" and a disciple of Auguste Comte. In some ways his ideas for information storage and retrieval presaged an analog version of the World Wide Web.

[Chris Ingram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable account of an early 20th century visionary whose thoughts about organizing information and making it available to humankind are oddly prescient, considering that they predate computers and the Internet by half a century or more. It is also a tragic story - the internationalist visions of the early
1900s falling by the wayside, casualties of two world wars.

[Sabra Kurth]

Premature Vision

Paul Otlet, one of many Fathers of the Internet" worked to establish a global means of classifying and sharing the world's knowledge. He was a man ahead of his time condemned to sing index cards and microfilm rather than bytes and dependent on meagre government handouts rather than advertising dollars. His story is an interesting prequel to the Internet Age.

[Victoria Olsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched and well written-- the book traces the impact of Paul Otlet, bibliographer and inventor, on the intellectual history of the internet. An impressive work that draws on many different fields and connects a lot of dots.

[Michael Rhode · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but a bit padded in parts. I'm very sympathetic to the basic issue of linking information and making it available though.