author
Paul Otlet
1868–1944
A Belgian visionary who tried to organize all the world's knowledge long before the internet, he is often remembered as a pioneer of information science. His ambitious ideas about catalogs, networks, and shared access to information still feel strikingly modern.
3 Audiobooks
L'Île du Levant
by Paul Otlet
Création d'un répertoire bibliographique universel : Conférence Bibliographique Internationale, 1895, publication no. 1
by Henri La Fontaine, Paul Otlet
L'Afrique aux Noirs
by Paul Otlet
About the author
Born in Brussels on August 23, 1868, Paul Otlet was a Belgian bibliographer, lawyer, writer, and peace activist. Working with Henri La Fontaine, he helped found the International Institute of Bibliography in 1895 and developed the Universal Decimal Classification, a system designed to sort knowledge in a more detailed and flexible way.
Otlet is best known for the Mundaneum, an enormous project that aimed to gather and organize the world's recorded information. He imagined a universal network of knowledge that people could consult from afar, which is one reason later readers have seen him as a remarkably early thinker of the information age.
He continued writing and promoting international cooperation through the first half of the 20th century, even as war and political upheaval disrupted many of his plans. He died in Brussels on December 10, 1944, but his reputation has grown over time as historians have recognized how boldly he imagined the future of information sharing.