The Tragedy of the Mundaneum

CILIP Library and Information History Group Conference 2011

Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, 1949

Whatever the world includes or dreams create.Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.They say the wealth of volumes it containsOutnumbers the stars or the grains Of sand in the desert. The manWho tried to read them all would loseHis mind and the use of his reckless eyes.

Jorge Luis Borges, Alexandria, A.D. 641, 1977

“May the rays of the Mundaneum help amplify and advance Life, Knowledge and Universal Civilisation.”

Illustration © Igor PlatounoffImage from: Rayward, Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge, 2010.

Image from: Rayward, The Universe of Information, 1975.

“where there is much intellectual life… where there will be great diversity which will lead to something real for myself and society…”

Printed matter as a whole summarizes and synthesizes all information. It constitutes the memory of humanity and registers its collective experience. Its power for the general good will be especially strengthened when its accessibility is made easier through more systematic selection and more detailed and better organised cataloguing, but also through publication procedures which are more responsive to general needs and which are placed under the control of the Associations themselves.

Otlet and La Fontaine, 1914

Image from: commons.wikimedia.org

The Catalogue Room of the International Office of BibliographyImage from: Rayward, The Universe of Information, 1975.

Le Répertoire iconographique universel

Universal Iconographic Repertory1905

La Bibliothèque collective des sociétés savantes

The Collective Library of Learned Societies

1906Le Musée de la livreThe Museum of the Book

1906

Le Répertoire universel de documentation

The Universal Repertory of Documentation

1907

Le Musée de la presseThe Newspaper Museum1907

The Palais MondialImage from: commons.wikimedia.org

A... radical assumption would consider that all knowledge, all information could be so condensed that it could be contained in a limited number of works placed on a desk, therefore within hand's reach, and indexed in such a way as to ensure maximum consultability. In this case the world described in the entirety of books would really be within everyone's grasp. The Universal Book created from all books would become very approximately an annex to the brain, a substratum even of memory, an external mechanism and instrument of the mind but so close to it, so apt to its use that it would truly be a sort of appended organ, an exodermic appendage.

Paul Otlet, Traité de documentation, 1934.

Inside the Mundaneum

Image from Flickr user: Matthew Burpee

Image from: www.mundaneum.be

The Mundaneum as it exists today in Mons, BelgiumImages from: www.mundaneum.be

Alex Wright, Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, 2007.

Otlet’s vision rested not just on communications technology but on brilliant insights into the possibility of stitching otherwise discrete bits of information together, creating semantic relationships that would allow users to navigate from one resource to another across an electronic network. In 1934 the notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe such relationships, until Otlet invented one: “links.” He envisioned the whole endeavour as a great “réseau”: a web.

The surviving Mundaneum card cataloguesImage from Flickr user: fdecomite

Give all the elements of international life the means of making contact with each other in an extraterritorial World City which will function as a permanent home for associations and will express in a visible symbol the oneness of mankind.

Paul Otlet, address given in 1931

World City plans by Le Corbusier and P. Jeannneret

Image from: Rayward, Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge, 2010.

Map courtesy of Voices for the Library team member, Ian Anstice at publiclibrariesnews.com

Voices for the Library is a place for everyone who loves libraries to share their stories

and experiences of the value of public libraries.

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RAYWARD, W. B., 1975. The universe of information: the work of Paul Otlet for documentation and international organisation. Moscow: All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI). RAYWARD, W. B., 1990. International organisation and dissemination of knowledge: selected essays of Paul Otlet. Amsterdam: Elsevier. RAYWARD, W. B., 1994. Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45 (4), pp. 235-250. RAYWARD, W. B., ed., 2008. European Modernism and the information society: informing the present, understanding the past. Aldershot: Ashgate. RAYWARD, W. B., 2010. Mundaneum: Archives of Knowledge. Occasional Papers, 215, May 2010. OTLET, P., 1934. Traité de documentation. Le livre sur le livre: théorie et pratique. Liège: Centre de Lecture publique de la Communauté française. OTLET, P., 1935. Monde, essai d universalisme: connaissance du monde, sentiment du monde, action organis e et plan du monde. Brussels: Mundaneum. VAN DEN HEUVEL, C., 2010. Authoritative Annotations, Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Delivered at the Wikipedia Conference, 26 March 2010 in Amsterdam. 

WRIGHT, A., 2007. Glut: mastering information through the ages. London: Cornell University Press.