Mundaneum

As shown by Krajewski’s research, an index is needed in order to organise the world’s information and there needs to be a categorical system for the user to access the contents. In 1895 Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine imagined the Mundaneum, a universal catalogue

consisting of the documented knowledge of the entire world, considered by some as the world’s first (analogue) search engine.²⁰ By the 1920s their vision was housed in Brussels where rows and rows of brown, wooden cabinets were filled with index cards containing individual elements of knowledge: books, newspaper articles, photos and other documents that had been

extrapolated from all kinds of sources, including collated archives and libraries located elsewhere.²¹ Originally called the Universal Bibliographic Repertory, people were able to

20 ‘The project was something like a paper Google, but developed decades before the Internet and without the benefit of computers’ (Laaf 2011).

21 Before the Nazi's dismantled it and replaced it with pro-Nazi art, it was a meeting place for scholars but also a huge archive. It is now housed in Mons, Belgium. Google scours the world looking for ‘roots of the web’ and makes cultural investments relative to its series of products in order to improve its public image. In return, ‘The Mundaneum […] agreed to use Google’s social networking service, Google Plus, as a promotional tool’ (Laaf 2011). When I visited in November 2016 the staff informed me that they turned down this type of financing and

submit their queries from afar, using the quickest means of the day ––the telegram––but mostly hand-written letters comprised the requests, sometimes 1500 per year. With this organisational system, ‘librarians’, who were predominantly women, searched the index cards and found answers to the queries.²² (Figure 12)

For the Mundaneum, or ‘mechanical, collective brain’, Otlet and La Fontaine drew on Dewey’s decimal system of classification (1894) as their basic structure. In 1904, with the help of

researchers from Europe, England and the U.S., Otlet and Fontaine produced their own Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). This ‘map’ of knowledge unified personal

classification systems and Dewey standardisations, expanding upon the catalogue in order to unite the various sciences to become ‘in effect a highly complex database management system’

(Rayward 2002:4). Although Otlet’s project to catalogue, classify and structure knowledge was considered visionary, his universal taxonomy system along with his praise of the colonisation of the Congo and attempts by Belgium King Leopold II at ‘civilising Africa’ as well as his

‘apparently benevolent interest in advancing “The African Issue” was fuelled by a firm conviction of the superiority of European culture and intelligence’ (Constant 2020).²³

This ‘mechanical, collective brain’ also incorporated the concept of ‘documentation’ and how it organises the world’s information, which Otlet previously described in his Treaty on

documentation: the book on the book, theory and practice.²⁴ In 1911 Otlet lectured on the future of books as ‘containers of ideas’, augmented by graphics and diagrams as well proposing how it could be ‘dissected’ (Otlet 1909:19 cited by Rayward 2002:3) such that ‘each intellectual element, in corresponding to a physical element, will create a structure such that any

combination of ideas, notions and facts will be possible’ (ibid). For Otlet, the book needed to be

‘transformed in some way’ and this ‘body’ or corpus had various headings so that ‘different searches using the same graphic elements on the cards are possible’ (ibid:5). Besides organising and recording information, ‘automatic retrieval’ at any point in time mattered, with Otlet stating that ‘[documentation is] a vast intellectual mechanism designed to capture and condense

fragmentary and scattered information and to disseminate it wherever it is needed’ (Otlet 1909:11 cited by ibid). Various types of media including radio, images, microfilm and sound recordings along with traditional text elements comprised this ‘documentation’, which ‘involved a complex of processes for the analysis, synthesis (what he also referred to as ‘codification’) and distribution of information through a network’ (Van den Heuvel and Rayward 2011:4).

Beyond the technique of documentation, the manner in which information could be viewed, recombined and organised mechanically was the moment in which this new form of the book became the database (Rayward 1994). ‘In effect, Otlet envisaged not only new ways of

organizing knowledge to create a special kind of database, but also new ways of communicating or interacting with the database’ (Van den Heuvel and Rayward 2011:4). Otlet envisioned a

‘mechanical, collective brain’ as a way to shift from the paper document or record, contained

exchange deal in order to have more control and autonomy over the Mundaneum. The location in Mons is not far from one of Google’s largest data centres in Europe, to which I couldn’t gain access. See Chapter 9.

22 This ‘city of knowledge’ was conceived with ‘electric telescopes’ that enabled ‘users’ to search and browse the card catalogue.

23 ‘At several occasions, Otlet published racist statements dressed up as scientific facts, starting at the beginning of his career with L’Afrique Aux Noirs (1888) where he argued that white people or ‘westernized’ blacks were to be tasked with ‘civilising’ Africa. Similarly, in Monde (1935), near the end of his life, he claimed the biological superiority of white people [....]It neatly fitted the Enlightenment project that he was dedicated to and aligned with his self-identification as a liberal, a universalist and a pacifist’(Constant 2020).

24 Traité de documentation: le livre sur le livre, théorie et pratique. Editions Mundaneum (Bruxelles 1934).

within an archive, to a database of objects of organised content. A paperless chain of

disseminating research, information and thereby knowledge, this ‘universal network’ connected and combined a variety of contemporaneous media: index cards with telephones, telegrams with search queries and (200,000) postcards. Besides 16,000,000 index cards, by 1934 the

Mundaneum contained an enormous quantity of images, with Otlet rearranging their relationships by organising a quasi-circular rotating structure to which other links were connected. (Figure 13)

Figure 13: ‘Le Monde et sa Classification’, Atlas, Encyclopaedia Universalis, Mundaneum by Paul Otlet.

Collection Mundaneum, Mons (Belgium).

This ‘hyperlinked’ structure wasn’t just to connect various pieces of data with one another––

Otlet wanted the links themselves to have meanings, or ‘associative indexing’. Moreover, Otlet’s ‘mechanical, collective brain’ was designed to not only store all of the world’s information as a centrally-structured body involving libraries, archives, museums and other types of ‘offices of documentation,’ but to organise it in a standardised way for processing the information. By rethinking the format of a book, Otlet envisioned a collaborative process that would improve upon the production of knowledge and its dissemination. According to Van Den Heuvel and Rayward, books, as well as the diagrams and images drawn by Otlet, ‘were

effectively interfaces that Otlet created in trying to visually get a grip on problems of scalability, representation, and perception of relationships between classes of knowledge objects that might be of interest today’ (ibid:1). The mechanical element of searching and spreading information along with its integration into public knowledge reflected the future of the book as a machine à penser (machine to think with) (Otlet 1911:291 cited by ibid:3).