Pursue your dream--and never accept a proven solution! This is ... Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one of several people who has been considered the father of Information modern Science; a field he himself called ‘documentation.’

Transcript

1. This is
4. Paul Otlet Image credit: flickr.com/marcwathieu/4421630189
5. He wanted to collect and organize Image copyright: Unknown
6. the World’s Knowledge
7. Formally stated: “Paul Otlet—pronounced /ɒtˈleɪ/—is one of several people who has been considered the father of modern Information Science a field he himself called documentation.” This and the following citations: wikipedia.org
8. So what?
9. Image credit: flickr.com/george_eastman_house/4420695962 Disclaimer: This is not Paul Otlet! Born on August 23, 1868 in Brussels, Belgium, as the oldest child to
10. Image credit: flickr.com/statelibraryofnsw/2964804829 a wealthy businessman who made his fortune selling Trams around the world
11. His mother died at age 24 when Otlet was three
12. His father kept him out of school, he had—as a child—few friends, and he soon developed a love of reading and Image credit: flickr.com/cornelluniversitylibrary/3610752603
13. Books Image credit: flickr.com/benchilada/2466968689
14. Image credit: flickr.com/candiedwomanire/1651870 Books—the accepted and proven storage medium for the World’s Knowledge
15. in 1892
16. An accepted solution. But really an adequate storage medium?
17. Think about it!
18. How could you possibly find a book you needed?
19. There are a few physical instances of the book
20. in libraries
21. somewhere on this planet Image credit: flickr.com/gadl/3907891398
22. To complicate things further
23. “Books are an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them is an arbitrary decision on the part of the author's, making individual facts difficult to locate” Image credit: flickr.com/horiavarlan/4263326117
24. “A better storage system”, Otlet wrote in his first essay in 1892, “would be cards containing individual ‘chunks’ of information” Image credit: flickr.com/deano/2865863332
25. Those chunks would allow “all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling”
26. Inter-what?
27. interfiling Image credit: flickr.com/amattox/3207213522
28. A Web
29. Cut.
30. Already in 1891, Otlet had met Henri La Fontaine Image credit: flickr.com/peacepalacelibrary/3095591442
31. He quit his job as a lawyer and the two men founded the Universal Bibliographic Repertory— Image credit: Unknown Disclaimer: This was not Paul’s and Henri’s garage!
32. a collection of index cards that, by the end of 1895, had grown to 400,000 entries; later it would reach a height of over 15 million
33. With capital from the Belgium Society of Social and Political Sciences, a fee-based search service, and La Fontaine’s Nobel Peace Price winnings, the startup endured until it hit the ceiling of World War I Image credit: flickr.com/nlscotland/3011962527
34. After 1919, the two men restarted, relaunched, and rebranded the Repertory twice as the World Palace and the Mundaneum, continuing on government funding, hiring staff, accumulating 15 million index cards, drowning in paper, of course
35. experimenting with new media as well Image credit: flickr.com/mburpee/2589663547
36. but being forced to close the shop when Belgium government cut off funding in 1934—
37. World War II shuttered what was left.
38. Otlet died in 1944, fading into oblivion
39. long before Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Larry & Sergey would enter the scene.
40. Sad story?
41. Well. Lessons to be learned:
43. Quit your job as a lawyer!
45. Pursue your dream!
47. And never accept a proven solution.
48. felgner.ch Wanna read more?