Index, File, Retrieve...

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Pictured, my latest book acquisition, which arrived this afternoon. Although, like most people, I have long known about the original Dewey Decimal System for the classification of written work: my school library was thus organised, as was the Spring Hill Public Lending Library in Birmingham, where I first got my love of books as a child. But until this last week, when I found a piece in the weekly paper 'New World'  titled 'The Man Who Invented The Internet Too Soon', which introduced me to the subject of the above book: Paul Otlet. Otlet [1868-1944], who was a Belgian author, lawyer and peace activist with far-reaching ideas on information collation, cataloguing and retrieval; I was completely unaware of the man whose system now catalogues most of the world's books. In association with Henri La Fontaine [1854-1943], he extended Dewey's Classification, under licence, and to be in French only, as the basis of a proposed system of Universal Classification with the ultimate aim of producing a global repository of knowledge, readily accessible by all.

I recommend checking out their Wikipedia entries as a starting point, as both a source of background and also as an illustration in point of pretty much their proposed modus operandi and global aims (WikiPedia itself). The ideas they propounded really did prefigure the modern internet with its universal search and retrieval of knowledge, accessible to all connected to the network. Remarkably prescient, their work was almost completely undone by the Nazi regime operating in the Low Countries and France during WWII. The one thing the occupying forces left completely intact though ['...it might be useful...'] was their vast card index, Otlet's 'Universal Bibliography', containing some fifteen million cross-referenced entries on individual index cards, stored in a huge grid of wooden cabinets. I look forward to reading Wright's book, and will probably put something further together on the subject here, when I'm done. Also, I like the touch that this copy of his work is an ex-library volume...

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