Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; ; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian bibliographer, lawyer, and peace activist, and a key figure in documentation science, a precursor to information science.
Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, which would later become a faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "" (RBU). RBU was used by the International Institute of Bibliography which later became the Mundaneum. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize and connect knowledge, culminating in two books, the (1934) and (1935).Michael Buckland, Paul Otlet, Pioneer of Information Management, biography of Paul Otlet for the School of Information at UC Berkeley, n.d.Alex Wright, Forgotten Forefather, Paul Otlet. , Boxes and Arrows, 10 Nov. 2003. His ideas for information collection, storage and retrieval have been compared to early incarnations of the internet and search engines.
In 1907, following a huge international conference, Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations, which was renamed to the Union of International Associations in 1910, and which is still located in Brussels. They also created a great international center called at first (World Palace), later, the Mundaneum to house the collections and activities of their various organizations and institutes. Otlet witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information, resulting in the creation of new kinds of international organization.
Otlet also endorsed the internationalist politics of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO) along with fellow Mundaneum founder La Fontaine.
Early life and career Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child of Édouard Otlet (Brussels 13 June 1842-Blanquefort, France, 20 October 1907) and Maria (née Van Mons). His father, Édouard, was a wealthy businessman, selling and operating trams in the North of France. Through his mother, he was related to the Van Mons family, a prosperous family, and to the Verhaeren family, of which Emile Verhaeren was a notable Belgian poet. His mother died in 1871 at the age of 24, when Otlet was three. As a child Otlet had few friends, and only regularly played with his younger brother Maurice. He soon developed a love of reading and books.
His father kept him out of school, believing classrooms were a stifling environment. Eduoard opted to tutor the young Otlet at home during his primary schooling
At the age of six, financial hardships caused the family to move to Paris. Otlet went to school for the first time at 11. He started his formal schooling at a Jesuit school in Paris, where he stayed for the next three years. The family then returned to Brussels when Otlet was 14, and began to study at the prestigious Collège Saint-MichelAlain Deneef and Xavier Rousseaux (eds.), Quatre siècles de présence jésuite à Bruxelles, Kadoc, no. 58, Louvain, 2012. . in Brussels. In 1894, his father became a senator in the Belgian Senate for the Catholic Party. His father remarried to Valerie Linden, daughter of famed botanist Jean Jules Linden; the two eventually had five additional children. The family travelled often during this time, going on holidays and business trips to Italy, France and Russia.
Otlet was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the Free University of Brussels. His interests at university consisted of theology, philosophy and sciences before settling on law. He earned a law degree on 15 July 1890. He married his step-cousin, Fernande Gloner, soon afterward, on 9 December 1890. He then clerked with famed lawyer Edmond Picard, a friend of his father's.
Otlet soon became dissatisfied with his legal career, and began to take an interest in bibliography. His first published work on the subject was the essay "Something about bibliography", written in 1892. In it he expressed the belief that books were an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them was an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, making individual facts difficult to locate. A better storage system, Otlet wrote in his essay, would be cards containing individual "chunks" of information, that would allow "all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling." In addition would be needed "a very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge" that could allow classification of all of these chunks of data.
In 1891, Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends. They were commissioned in 1892 by Belgium's Societé des Sciences sociales et politiques (Society of social and political sciences) to create bibliographies for various of the social sciences; they spent three years doing this. In 1895, they came across the Dewey Decimal Classification, a library classification system that had been invented in 1876 by Melvil Dewey. They decided to try to expand this system to cover the classification of facts that Otlet had previously developed. They wrote to the system's creator, asking for permission to modify his system in a way closer to Otlet's system; he agreed, so long as their system was not translated into English. They began work on this expansion soon afterwards and thus created the Universal Decimal Classification.
During this time, Otlet and his wife then had two sons, Marcel and Jean, in quick succession.
Otlet founded the (IIB) in 1895 with La Fontaine after organizing the First International Conference on Bibliography together. Later renamed as (in English) the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). The FID was later renamed after Otlet’s death to The International Federation for Information and Documentation (Fédération Internationale d'Information et de Documentation, FID) in 1988, before eventually closing in 2002.
In 1894, he had Art Nouveau architect Octave van Rysselberghe build his mansion in Brussels, the so-called Hotel Otlet.
The Universal Bibliographic Repertory
In 1895, Otlet and La Fontaine also began the creation of a collection of index cards, meant to catalog facts, that came to be known as the "" (RBU), or the "Universal Bibliographic Repertory". By the end of 1895 it had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach more than 15 million entries.
In 1896, Otlet set up a fee-based service to answer questions by mail, by sending the requesters copies of the relevant index cards for each query; scholar Charles van den Heuvel has referred to the service as an "analog search engine". By 1912, this service responded to over 1,500 queries a year. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search.
Otlet envisioned a copy of the RBU in each major city around the world, with Brussels holding the master copy. At various times between 1900 and 1914, attempts were made to send full copies of the RBU to cities such as Paris, Washington, D.C. and Rio de Janeiro; however, difficulties in copying and transportation meant that no city received more than a few hundred thousand cards.
The Universal Decimal Classification In 1904, Otlet and La Fontaine began to publish their classification scheme, which they termed the Universal Decimal Classification. The UDC was originally based on Melvil Dewey's Decimal classification system. Otlet and La Fontaine contacted Melvil Dewey to inquire if they could modify the Dewey Decimal System to suit the parameters of their bibliographic project, namely, organizing information in the social and natural sciences. Dewey granted them permission as long as it substantially differed from his original version. They worked with numerous subject experts, for example with Herbert Haviland Field at the Concilium Bibliographicum for Zoology, and completed this initial publication in 1907. The system defines not only detailed subject classifications, but also an algebraic notation for referring to the intersection of several subjects; for example, the notation "31:[622+669](485)" refers to the statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden. The UDC is an example of an analytico-synthetic classification, i.e., it permits the linking of one concept to another. Although some have described it as faceted, it is not, though there are some faceted elements in it. A truly faceted classification consists solely of simple concepts; there are many compound concepts listed in the UDC. It is still used by many libraries and bibliographic services outside the English-speaking world, and in some non-traditional contexts such as the BBC Archives.
Personal difficulties and World War I In 1906, with his father Édouard near death and his businesses falling apart, Paul and his brother and five step-siblings formed a company, ("Otlet Brothers") to try to manage these businesses, which included mines and railways. Paul, though he was consumed with his bibliographic work, became president of the company. In 1907, Édouard died, and the family struggled to maintain all parts of the business. In April 1908, Paul Otlet and his wife began divorce proceedings. Otlet remarried in 1912, to Cato Van Nederhesselt.
In 1913, La Fontaine won the Nobel Peace Prize, and invested his winnings into Otlet and La Fontaine's bibliographic ventures, which were suffering from lack of funding. Otlet journeyed to the United States in early 1914 to try to get additional funding from the U.S. Government, but his efforts soon came to a halt due to the outbreak of World War I. Otlet returned to Belgium, but quickly fled after it became occupied by the Germans; he spent the majority of the war in Paris and various cities in Switzerland. Both his sons fought in the Belgian army, and one of them, Jean, died during the war in the Battle of the Yser.
Otlet spent much of the war trying to bring about peace, and the creation of multinational institutions that he felt could avert future wars. In 1914, he published a book, "" ("The End of War") that defined a "World Charter of Human Rights" as the basis for an international federation.
The Mundaneum
In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine first envisioned a "city of knowledge", which Otlet originally named the "" ("World Palace"), that would serve as a central repository for the world's information. In 1919, soon after the end of World War I, they convinced the government of Belgium to give them the space and funding for this project, arguing that it would help Belgium bolster its bid to house the League of Nations headquarters. They were given space in the left wing of the , a government building in Brussels. They then hired staff to help add to their Universal Bibliographic Repertory.
In 1921 Otlet wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois offering the use of the Palais Mondial for the 2nd Pan-African Congress. Although both Otlet and Fontaine offered a warm welcome to the Congress, these sentiments were not shared across all of Belgian society. The Brussels-based paper Neptune stated that the organisers – particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People were funded by the Bolsheviks – and raised concern that it might lead to difficulties in the Belgian Congo by drawing together "all the ne’er-do-wells of the various tribes of the Colony, aside from some hundreds of labourers".