Paul Otlet - Father of Documentation, Forefather of Information Architecture

Some people live before their time. Paul Otlet was one of those people. He was a Belgian Information Architect born in 1868 who dreamed of a future where all documents were interlinked and were accessible remotely, and he worked toward "a machinery, unaffected by distance, which would combine at the same time radio, X-Rays, cinema and microscopic photography. Thus the moving image of the world would be established, its memory, its true duplicate." With his friend and colleague Henri La Fontaine, he attempted to do with card catalogues what eventually would be done online, creating in the process the Universal Catalogue, a system spun off from Dewey which would allow the world to classify not just a book, but what lay in it. As this article on Boxes and Arrows says:

After evaluating the classification systems then in use, such as Dewey Decimal and the British Museum system, Otlet concluded that they all shared a fatal flaw: they were designed to guide readers as far as the individual book—but no further. Ranganathan had voiced the ethos of modern cataloging when he said: “every reader his or her book, and every book its reader.” But once book and reader were matched, they were left pretty well to their own devices.

Otlet wanted to go a step further. He wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the books themselves, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions” inside.

The following documentary was produced for Dutch television in 1998 - curiously in English and French - narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, Otlet's biographer. (via the Internet Archive).