Otlet...not Gore

Drawing Paul Otlet

"Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, as a whole or in certain of its parts."-- Paul Otlet ["Monde" 1934].

In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge.

Biography of Paul Otlet

[Part English; part French]

Narrated by W. Boyd Rayward [biographer]

Dutch Television

1998

George Dyson--computers

World Wide Web and Paul Otlet