Mundaneum by Paul Otlet

A blog about the infographic exposition at IA Summit, about Paul Otlet´s history

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O Homem que queria classificar o mundo, legendado em português

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Mundaneum - The archive center

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A timeline 

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Mundaneum_How Hypermidia looked en 1934 by Paula Macedo

Infographic presented at Information Architecture Summit 2014 - Poster Night

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The Secret History of Hypertext

The conventional history of computing leaves out some key thinkers.

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Mundaneum at Information Architecture Summit - Poster Night

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How could Otlet have imagined such a system in an age before microchips, personal computers or networking protocols? In the early twentieth century, he seems to have spotted a confluence of economic and technological forces that were accelerating the production of recorded information. The industrialization of the printing press, the rise of institutional “knowledge bureaus,” and the emergence of a literate Western citizenry who could suddenly afford to buy cheaply produced books and periodicals, all contributed to an unprecedented outpouring of published knowledge that would continue to accelerate throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day. Otlet saw these trends coming before most of his contemporaries, and started to imagine a radical new solution for managing the data deluge: a networked information environment. Alex Wright

http://worldsciencefestival.com/blog/alex_wright_premonitions_of_the_internet

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Interview with Boyd Rayward

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Mundaneum.Org

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The Mundaneum Museum honors the first concept of a world wide wonder, sketched out by Paul Otlet in 1934 as a global network of “electric telescopes.”

Alex Wright

UX New York Times

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Paul Otlet, visioning a web 

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Paul Otlet imagined a future without paper, where the technological devices of his time such as phonograph, radio, tv and telephone would substitute the book. 

In fact they would become a new book, the most powerful device for thediusion of human thoughts. This would be a broadcast library, a televised book. The Palais Mondial - Mundaneum - Word Palace was a universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedia survey of human knowledge, and Otlet also wrote and created systems for something resembling an analogic hypermida, the International network for Universal Documentation. He outlined these grand vision of easily accessible knowledge and interconnected data many decades before Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Beer Lee rst articulated this.

Otlet and La Fontaine built an analog hypertext system, they collected and catalogued as much bibliographic knowledge as they could and crossed-indexed it into inumerous rows of card trays.

At its peak they had 17 million index cards spread throughout a system of search and retrieval.

The universal book was part of the Universal City, which was a part of the universal storage of all human knowledge or what we called "Mundaneum”.

Mundaneum contained all books, articles, memories and published information in the World. These would become chapters of a single and immense book, the book of Universal Science, its one book made up of individual books that should be available to Everybody.

Otlet and La Fontaine were peace activists and this project of knowledge broadcast was part of a bigger project: the creation of the World City which would allow the dissemination of the human thinking throughout the World aiming World Peace.