The Archives of Paul Otlet: Between Appreciation and Rediscovery, 1944-2013

Manfroid, Stephanie; Gillen, Jacques

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/49309 Copy

Description

Title

The Archives of Paul Otlet: Between Appreciation and Rediscovery, 1944-2013

Author(s)

• Manfroid, Stephanie
• Gillen, Jacques

Contributor(s)

Phillips-Batoma, Patricia M.

Issue Date

2013

Keyword(s)

• Otlet, Paul, 1868-1944
• Rayward, W.Boyd

Abstract

This paper outlines the life and work of Paul Otlet (1868–1944). Otlet was a founder of the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, documentation, and information science. As a result of the work he undertook with Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943)—specifically, the establishment in 1895 in Brussels of the International Institute of Bibliography, which aimed to construct a Universal Bibliographic Repertory—Otlet has become known as the father of the Internet. Otlet’s grand project, as stated in his Traité de documentation (1934), was never fully realized. Even before his death, the collections he assembled had been dismembered. After his death, the problematic conditions in which Otlet’s personal papers and the collections he had created were preserved meant that his thought and work remained largely unacknowledged. It fell to W. Boyd Rayward, who began to work on Otlet in the late 1960s, to rescue him from obscurity, publishing in 1975 a major biography of the pioneer knowledge entrepreneur and internationalist progenitor of the World Wide Web.

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ISSN

1559-0682

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/49309

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2013.0040

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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