Librarians Don’t Forget ‘Your Past’ – And, Tell the World

This morning, my American friend Marcus Banks kindly sent me the link to today’s fascinating New York Times article entitled “The web that time forgot“. Written by Alex Wright (http://www.alexwright.org/), the piece sent my brain into overdrive this morning as I began to think about ‘the man who wanted to classify everything’ – Paul Otlet. I read through the article before attending meetings this morning, and couldn’t stop thinking about the piece and what I would eventually blog. (Bloggers can relate.)

One of the reasons for the brainstorm is that I have had a long fascination with the major thinkers in our field – and I take great pains to remind my students about them, as my teachers did with me. Great library ideas-men like medicine’s John Shaw Billings, the British Museum’s ‘Prince of Librarians’ Antonio Panizzi and classification/”Cutter number”.-man Charles Cutter. Often, members of the public point to Melville Dewey as a knowable, memorable librarian, but he is just the tip of the iceberg for those interested in reading about the many other icons.

One icon you may not hear about often (but one I remember Ronald Hagler mentioning at SLAIS) was documentation founder Paul Otlet. An international figure in information science between the wars, Otlet made an indelible mark on our field. However, he is remembered not for his ideas around organizing information as much as his lack of success in realizing his vision – which is aptly described in the NY Times piece.

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In the New York Times, Wright draws some very important parallels between the work of Otlet and the ideas that underpin Berners-Lee’s notion of the semantic web. This is an important but not altogether isolated revelation. The article made my head buzz with ideas and eureka moments after months of self-doubt around my thinking for a future, illusory web organized by librarians.

In the article, for example, Wright (http://www.alexwright.org/) writes:

“I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet,” said his biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional librarians, the original Mundaneum [see photo left] could never have accommodated the sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.

“I don’t think it could have scaled up” Rayward said. “It couldn’t even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world [Otlet] was living in.”

What also seems clear is that Otlet’s version of hypertext has a number of important advantages over today’s ill-organized, everything-is-miscellaneous web. For one thing, Otlet’s vision was to develop better connections between ideas – think of these connections as smarter hyperlinks. Today, links on the web serve as a kind of ‘mute bond’ between documents. However, Otlet envisioned linkages carrying meaning through annotations of particular documents. That two-way interactivity is lacking in the weak logic of the current web, and librarians should work to change it.

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In retrospect, what is remarkable about Otlet is that he envisioned a world where knowledge could be linked and made available to anyone (what he called an International Network for Universal Documentation). He built what he called structured document collections that involved index cards filed in library-like cabinets according to ever-expanding ontologies. Indexers culled information from diverse sources and information retrieval answered written requests by copying relevant information from index cards. Light bulb – the semantic web!

Read the article. Some ideas are reminiscent of what Allan and I wrote here and here. It reminds me of the importance of standing on the shoulder of giants – and, to establish some understanding of the work of librarians that have come before us.