Bookseller Review: CATALOGING THE WORLD

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright
Reviewed by Jan

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.

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Copies of Cataloging the World are available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com.