Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright
Reviewed by Jan
Alex Wright channels his inner James Gleick here and offers us a compelling biography, not only of an important forerunner to information science, but a brief biography of the birth of the Web and information science itself.
In my years in library school, I never even heard of Paul Otlet, yet he was a man who envisioned a network of organized information similar to what information scientists are working on to this day. Otlet was an idealist who subscribed to the ideas of positivism: mainly, that society operates on a series of laws, just as the physical world does. These laws are derived from empirical knowledge (evidence). Access to knowledge is imperative for humanity to advance. Among his accomplishments, he developed the concept of “documentation,” standardized microfiche, conceptualized the League of Nations.
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