Paul Otlet

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet ( 23 August 1868 – 10 December 1944) was a Belgian bibliographer, author, entrepreneur, lawyer and peace activist. He is best known for his promotion of universal documentation and as co-founded and leader of the International Institute for Bibliography, later named the International Federation for Documentation.

Works

Otlet founded numerous ambitious international organizations generally in collaboration with Henri LaFontaine.

Publications

Otlet wrote and published very frequently. Many of his writings were published or reprinted in the IIB Publications series. For a list see Rayward, W. B. Bibliography of the works of Paul Otlet.

• Traité de documentation. [Treatise on documentation] Bruxelles, Mundaneum, Palais Mondial, 1934. His best-known, encyclopedic work.
• Monde, essai d'universalisme. [World: Essay on universalism]. Bruxelles, Mundaneum, 1935. A theoretic work that complements his Traité de documentation.
• Otlet, Paul, International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays. Translated and edited by W. Boyd Rayward. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1990. A useful selection selection of Otlet's writings, carefully translated and annotated by his biographer.

• "Un peu de bibliographie." Palais, Organe des Conférences du jeune barreau de Belgique 1891-1892: 254-271. This short early paper outlined his life's work. An English translation "Something about Bibliography" in International Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Selected Essays, pp. 11-24.

Further reading

• "Paul Otlet" Wikipedia [1]

• Rayward, W. Boyd. The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and international Organization. FID Publication 520. Moscow: International Federation for Documentation by the All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), 1975. A detailed well-documented account.
• Levie, Françoise. 2002. The man who wanted to classify the world: From the index card to the World City, the visionary life of a Belgian utopian, Paul Otlet (1968-1944). Brussels: Sofidoc. Documentary film
• Wright, Alex. Cataloguing the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford University Press, 2014. A readable biography.

Papers

The Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium, houses 6 kilometers of archived resources by and about Otlet, his associates, and their activities. [2]