Name: Cataloging the world
ISBN: 9780199931415

Cataloging the world

"The dream of universal knowledge hardly started with the digital age. From the archives of Sumeria to the Library of Alexandria, humanity has long wrestled with information overload and management of intellectual output. Revived during the Renaissance and picking up pace in the Enlightenment, the dream grew and by the late nineteenth century was embraced by a number of visionaries who felt that at long last it was within their grasp. Among them, Paul Otlet stands out. A librarian by training, he worked at expanding the potential of the catalogue card -- the world's first information chip. From there followed universal libraries and reading rooms, connecting his native Belgium to the world -- by means of vast collections of cards that brought together everything that had ever been put to paper. Recognizing that the rapid acceleration of technology was transforming the world's intellectual landscape, Otlet devoted himself to creating a universal bibliography of all published knowledge. Ultimately totaling more than 12 million individual entries, it would evolve into the Mundaneum, a vast "city of knowledge" that opened its doors to the public in 1921. By 1934, Otlet had drawn up plans for a network of "electric telescopes" that would allow people everywhere to search through books, newspapers, photographs, and recordings, all linked together in what he termed a réseau mondial: a worldwide web.

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xkriva11Apr 2023

I add some:

It's behind you, the making of a computer game (https://bizzley.42web.io/?i=1)

Rebel Code (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/289947.Rebel_Code)

Just for Fun (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/160171.Just_for_Fun?from...)

The Computer - My Life (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/594610.The_Computer_My_L...)

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18699137-cataloging-the-...)

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TomteOct 2022

This is German, but I found it very good:

https://www.isi.hhu.de/fileadmin/redaktion/Fakultaeten/Philo...

Books:

* Cataloging the World

* Organising Knowledge. Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness

* The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization

* The Oxford Guide to Library Research

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xkriva11May 2022

Ad multi-user Forth, I have a question, and you may know the answer. In the Forth history on forth.com, they write:

"By the late 1980s, polyFORTH users such as NCR were supporting as many as 150 users on a single 80386-based PC."

Do you have any idea how that was done? I do not know any hardware way from that era that was able to connect 150 terminals to a single PC.

For anyone interested, there is a nice book about Paul Otlet: "Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age."

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kkfxApr 2022

Thanks :-)

I'll add Cataloging the World, by Alex Wright and Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski plus few relatively recent articles:

- Note Taking as an Art of Transmission http://doi.org/10.1086/427303

- From Note-Taking to Data Banks https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2010.492615

- Facing Interfaces: Paul Otlet's Visualizations of Data Integration https://www.mondotheque.be/wiki/images/e/e2/Heuvel_Rayward_F...

There are surely many others and following those we arrive to classic PIM publications, witch is "the system to organize personal digital information" in the end!

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for_i_in_rangeApr 2021

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been interested in the field of Information Science/Studies since discovering it recently. First via Semantic Web and Linked Data, then Taxonomy and Knowledge Management, then PKM and Zettelkasten. Just finished Cataloging the World about Paul Otlet. It’s a fantastic book.

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leggomylibroAug 2017

I think that Paul Otlet may be your man for that sort of thing. He was obsessed with how to organize and catalog not only things, but knowledge and information.

Interesting guy, and ahead of his time. It's too bad that his work (along with the rest of the world) was mostly dropped on the floor in the chaos of WWI and II. There's a book about him called, "Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet

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