On the screen will appear the page which contains the answer to the questions posed over the phone. This screen can be split into two, four or ten parts, if there are multiple texts and documents to be shown simultaneously. There will be a loudspeaker if sight needs to be supplemented by sound.
Here we have a slightly archaic description of a modern computer; the product details are not necessarily ideal for marketing a smartphone or a tablet.
Except that the description was written in 1934.
It was written by a Belgian named Paul Otlet (1868-1944), an author, a pacifist and a champion of ‘universalism’. Between 1895 and 1935 Otlet built up a vast library of reference cards, containing what he hoped would be all the facts known to humankind. Although his political activity was somewhat overshadowed by his work in the gathering of knowledge, he also co-founded – with Henri Lafontaine, winner of the 1913 Nobel Peace Prize – the Bureau Central des Associations Internationales in 1907, still functioning today as the ‘Union of International Associations’ in collaboration with UNESCO. Throughout his life, Otlet remained a pacifist. But his main interest lay in his campaign to catalogue all knowledge, an interest which led to some remarkable practical efforts to make ‘facts’ available to everyone, via an early form of worldwide web.
In 1895, Otlet and Lafontaine collaborated to create what became known as the ‘Universal Decimal Classification’ (UDC). This enhanced the bibliographical scheme previously developed by Dewey. In a sentence: UDC allows for the classification of all knowledge in books or other media, under ten broad categories with infinite levels of sub-category, and – importantly – allows for all items thus classified to be cross-referenced with each other. The attempt to categorise all human knowledge has a long history, and flourished in Europe in the 17th century, with pioneering attempts by Leibniz in Germany, and men such as John Wilkins in Britain – all of them working to build a ‘universal language’ which would, in its logical construction, reflect the constructs of the real world. Two hundred years later, Dewey, Otlet and Lafontaine pushed the idea further down the road.
The categories and sub-categories of UDC in its early version merit some attention. There were ten primary categories to encompass all types of knowledge, namely: ‘General’; Philosophy; Theology and Religion; Social Sciences; Language; Pure Science; Applied Science; Art; Literature; History and Geography. Even at this level, we can see what was deemed important by two European intellectuals a century ago. This becomes even clearer when we examine the nine sub-categories within each category. ‘Religion’ contains eight subdivisions all relating to the Christian Church, with the ninth reserved for ‘various others’. ‘Literature’ reserves seven subdivisions for Ancient Greek and Latin, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, with one division for ‘Others’. (To be fair, the modern version of UDC – still very much in use – rectifies most of these issues.) Each category and sub-category is assigned its own numerical identifier, not restricted in length – thus, 930.85 is “History of Civilization. Cultural history”. This scheme would allow all knowledge to be classified.
With the UDC established, Otlet and Lafontaine now began to build up their ‘Repertoire Bibliographique Universel’ (RBU), a huge and growing collection of index-cards, each one categorised and containing a ‘fact’. In 1895, the collection comprised 400,000 cards; at its peak in 1934, it had grown to precisely 15,646,346. Seekers after truth would pay a fee and send in a question – in the early days by post, later by phone or telegraph. Staff at the RBU – overwhelmingly female, under male supervision – would consult the index-cards to find the answers, then return facsimiles of the relevant cards to the client. In modern terms: type a question into a search-engine, get a list of likely answers from the server.
By 1912, the number of enquiries annually had reached 1,500 – not huge, but respectable enough (by 1934, it peaked at 27,000). Otlet and Lafontaine began to think big. They came up with a plan for a Palais Mondial, in which their ‘repertory’ could be housed, a central server of knowledge for the entire world. Attempts were also made to set up satellite RBUs in Paris, Washington and Rio, by the simple, if unwieldy, expedient of exporting copies of all the index-cards; but that was never a success. In 1919, the Belgian government was persuaded to lease the RBU a huge building in Brussels to accommodate their ‘World Palace’. The institution grew apace; in 1924 Otlet renamed it, rather grandly, the ‘Mundaneum’. But in 1934, the government withdrew all funding, forcing the Mundaneum to close its doors, leaving the huge collection locked up inside; where it remained until the occupying Germans – looking for somewhere to exhibit a collection of Nazi art in 1940 – dumped the contents into a less-than-watertight building.
At the height of all this, Otlet put pen to paper and produced two books, in which he outlined his ideas on the collection and organisation of knowledge – what we now call ‘Information Science’.
The first of these books was his Traité de Documentation (Treatise on Documentation) of 1934. It is a monster, running to 350,000 words over 440 pages. It deals with everything you could wish to know about ‘documentation’, defined as anything that records and relays information – from a roadside ‘Stop’ sign, through maps and playing cards, phonographic discs and film-reels, to newspapers and books. All that Otlet asked of ‘documentation’ was that it be: universal, reliable and true, complete, swift, up-to-date, easy to obtain, edited in advance, ready for communication and available to the greatest number of people. Not much to ask, one would think.
It is impossible to summarise what this book contains: but it is safe to say that all aspects of documentation, its creators, its creation, its storage and distribution, is discussed. At around page 390, Otlet discusses ‘inventions to be made’ to further advance the science of documentation. Quite comfortable with such cutting-edge things as Radio, Television, Cinema and Microfiche, he now proposes some exotic devices which would have been science fiction to his contemporaries. Today they look eerily familiar: a method of mass-printing without a printing press; a cheap method of photography to reproduce text; a small camera to make instant copies; machines to speed up the process of writing; speech-to-text machines (and vice versa); a televisual method of reading text at a great distance; machines to aid translation. All very modern.
Otlet was never idle. One year after his ‘Treatise’, he published his Monde: Essai d’universalisme – a sort of Rough Guide to Everything – in a further 470 pages. Here he heavily promotes the functioning of the Mundaneum (by that time firmly shuttered): ‘Everyone can sit in their armchair and contemplate Creation’ – a succinct description of the Internet, maybe?
But he develops his arguments further: he argues for ‘Universalism’ as opposed to ‘Hyperseparatism’: the former can be described as joined-up thinking, global governance, co-ordinated economies; the latter by the growing tendency of societies, individuals and actions to become fragmented and compartmentalised. Diligent documentation was the only thing capable of ‘establishing regular and benevolent contact between people’. Otlet envisages a World Order facilitating free travel/migration for all, encouraging freedom of thought, and in which there would be international supervision of the seas and the air, of telephone systems, radio and television, railways and banks. Few of us, surely, would argue against these principles.
But his grasp of universalism was sadly Eurocentric. In this second book, for example, he lists the world’s natural wonders, almost all of which are in Europe (Fontainebleau Forest makes the grade). He unashamedly states that ‘Europe occupies the first place in the world’, having been ‘the principal home of science, arts and new ideas for 25 centuries.’ He voices racist and colonialist views: ‘Negroes … have very little aptitude for intellectual work, but excel at dancing and swimming …’; this was a curious stance, given that Otlet had hosted the Second Pan-African Congress of 1921 in his ‘Palais Mondial’, in the face of enormous hostility from the Belgian government and newspapers. He also promotes eugenics, and displays a patronising view of women and feminism. In short, he was a middle-class liberal European male of his times.
Some of us look with some unease on today’s Internet and its resounding echo-chambers. So it is perhaps timely to remember someone who, in the hope of uniting the human race, envisaged a worldwide web which collected and distributed knowledge, unhampered by the greed of capitalism and the grotesque manipulations of coercive states, populists and conspiracy-theorists. Understandably, Otlet never envisaged on-line shopping or the swamp of social media; he did, however, reflect on the venality of the Press. He was no revolutionary,. His conception of basic ‘facts’ was questionable, even naive. But, looking back on Otlet’s design for structured and accessible information, we might ask ourselves: what would that person in the armchair, contemplating Creation, have made of what we have now?