Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (; French: [pɔl maʁi ɡilɛ̃ ɔtlɛ]; 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian bibliographer, lawyer, and peace activist, and a key figure in documentation science, a precursor to information science. Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, which would later become a faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU). RBU was used by the International Institute of Bibliography which later became the Mundaneum. Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize and connect knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935). His ideas for information collection, storage and retrieval have been compared to early incarnations of the internet and search engines. In 1907, following a huge international conference, Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created the Central Office of International Associations, which was renamed to the Union of International Associations in 1910, and which is still located in Brussels. They also created a great international center called at first Palais Mondial (World Palace), later, the Mundaneum to house the collections and activities of their various organizations and institutes. Otlet witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of information, resulting in the creation of new kinds of international organization. Otlet also endorsed the internationalist politics of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (the forerunner of UNESCO) along with fellow Mundaneum founder La Fontaine.
Early life and career Otlet was born in Brussels, Belgium on 23 August 1868, the oldest child of Édouard Otlet (Brussels 13 June 1842-Blanquefort, France, 20 October 1907) and Maria (née Van Mons). His father, Édouard, was a wealthy businessman, selling and operating trams in the North of France. Through his mother, he was related to the Van Mons family, a prosperous family, and to the Verhaeren family, of which Emile Verhaeren was a notable Belgian poet. His mother died in 1871 at the age of 24, when Otlet was three. As a child Otlet had few friends, and only regularly played with his younger brother Maurice. He soon developed a love of reading and books. His father kept him out of school, believing classrooms were a stifling environment. Eduoard opted to tutor the young Otlet at home during his primary schooling At the age of six, financial hardships caused the family to move to Paris. Otlet went to school for the first time at 11. He started his formal schooling at a Jesuit school in Paris, where he stayed for the next three years. The family then returned to Brussels when Otlet was 14, and began to study at the prestigious Collège Saint-Michel in Brussels. In 1894, his father became a senator in the Belgian Senate for the Catholic Party. His father remarried to Valerie Linden, daughter of famed botanist Jean Jules Linden; the two eventually had five additional children. The family travelled often during this time, going on holidays and business trips to Italy, France and Russia. Otlet was educated at the Catholic University of Leuven and at the Free University of Brussels. His interests at university consisted of theology, philosophy and sciences before settling on law. He earned a law degree on 15 July 1890. He married his step-cousin, Fernande Gloner, soon afterward, on 9 December 1890. He then clerked with famed lawyer Edmond Picard, a friend of his father's. Otlet soon became dissatisfied with his legal career, and began to take an interest in bibliography. His first published work on the subject was the essay "Something about bibliography", written in 1892. In it he expressed the belief that books were an inadequate way to store information, because the arrangement of facts contained within them was an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, making individual facts difficult to locate. A better storage system, Otlet wrote in his essay, would be cards containing individual "chunks" of information, that would allow "all the manipulations of classification and continuous interfiling." In addition would be needed "a very detailed synoptic outline of knowledge" that could allow classification of all of these chunks of data.
In 1891, Otlet met Henri La Fontaine, a fellow lawyer with shared interests in bibliography and international relations, and the two became good friends. They were commissioned in 1892 by Belgium's Societé des Sciences sociales et politiques (Society of social and political sciences) to create bibliographies for various of the social sciences; they spent three years doing this. In 1895, they came across the Dewey Decimal Classification, a library classification system that had been invented in 1876 by Melvil Dewey. They decided to try to expand this system to cover the classification of facts that Otlet had previously developed. They wrote to the system's creator, asking for permission to modify his system in a way closer to Otlet's system; he agreed, so long as their system was not translated into English. They began work on this expansion soon afterwards and thus created the Universal Decimal Classification. During this time, Otlet and his wife then had two sons, Marcel and Jean, in quick succession. Otlet founded the Institut International de Bibliographie (IIB) in 1895 with La Fontaine after organizing the First International Conference on Bibliography together. Later renamed as (in English) the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). The FID was later renamed after Otlet’s death to The International Federation for Information and Documentation (Fédération Internationale d'Information et de Documentation, FID) in 1988, before eventually closing in 2002. In 1894, he had Art Nouveau architect Octave van Rysselberghe build his mansion in Brussels, the so-called Hotel Otlet.
The Universal Bibliographic Repertory
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