For some, the highlight of a trip to Belgium is a visit to an ancient brewery or a demonstration of diamond cutting. When Australian Boyd Rayward travelled to Brussels in 1968 there was only one sight he wanted to see: a disused university anatomy theatre. Unusual? Perhaps, but Rayward was a graduate student in library science, and the cobwebby old theatre with leaking skylights housed something he had to see before it vanished forever. Inside the gloomy theatre, Rayward found piles of papers and archives that had remained untouched since 1944. These were the last remnants of the Mundaneum, a vast and visionary attempt at an immense proto-internet made from the most unlikely of materials: 3-by-5-inch index cards.
UNLIKELY as it sounds now, the hottest thing in information technology was once the index card. In the US, for instance, the War Department struggled with mountains of medical files until the newfangled method of card filing was adopted in 1887. Soon hundreds of clerks were transcribing personnel records dating back to the War of Independence. Housed in Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC – the scene of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination a generation earlier – the initiative succeeded a little too well. Six years into the project, the combined weight of 30 million index cards led to information overload: three floors of the theatre collapsed, crushing 22 clerks to death.
Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet was not deterred. His mission in life was to build an even bigger house of cards. Otlet had spent his youth in 1880s Brussels drifting through law school, hardly the background you might expect for a pioneer of IT. But a persistent question nagged at him. Why, he wondered, was it so hard to find information in books?
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Often unindexed and organised according to the author’s whim, books seemed to bury information rather than present it efficiently. Worse, a book soon became outdated. “Its faults are numerous,” grumbled Otlet. “It constitutes something completed, finished, not susceptible to addition. It is impossible to link to similar or connected items… and research requires handling great masses of heavy paper.”
To Otlet, the Dewey decimal system of library cataloguing introduced in 1876 held the promise of rational book searches. Each part of a Dewey number leads a reader to exactly the right part of a library. For instance, 595.789 directs you to butterflies: walk to the 500 section (Natural Science & Mathematics), then to the 590 bookcases (Zoology), then to the 595 shelf (Other Invertebrates). The final 789 represents books on the shelf specifically devoted to butterflies. So why not go beyond merely cataloguing books and apply addresses to specific chunks of information, Otlet asked. It could be done simply by modifying Dewey’s system with infinitely extendable strings of numbers and letters, each representing smaller divisions of knowledge. Otlet’s ambition grew into a lifelong pursuit: he would transform the world’s knowledge from disordered books into decimally addressed chunks of information – each one fitted onto a common index card – and house it all in one central location.
Otlet’s timing was good. In 1919 Belgium was puffing itself up in a bid to host the proposed League of Nations, and the government gave Otlet an entire wing of the Palais du Cinquantenaire in which to pursue his project. Otlet had already made a dry run over the previous two decades by creating a library database of more than a million cards and sheets, each referenced by decimal addresses and searchable for a fee. Those seeking information could write in and one of a team of librarians would pick out the relevant cards, copy the contents and mail them back.
Otlet’s run of the palace was short-lived, however. When the Belgian government lost its bid to host the League of Nations, it booted him out to make room for a rubber-industry exhibit. Otlet’s response was to dream on an even grander scale. In 1928 he turned to Le Corbusier, the modernist prophet of reinforced concrete, and the two proposed an immense monument to human progress and knowledge, a building complex they dubbed the Mundaneum.
Part library and part museum, the Mundaneum would be built in a proposed “world city” within Geneva. Visitors would ascend a stylised ziggurat in lifts or via an external ramp 2 kilometres long, and as they descended floor by floor they would travel through history, from man’s beginning through the rise of civilisation, to emerge finally in the glorious modern age. At the heart of the Mundaneum, a prism-shaped library contained both ordinary books and Otlet’s index-card “universal book”. Connected to the building would be a World University, a 3000-seat auditorium, a stadium, the offices of the International Olympic Committee… and a zoo, an airport and a radio station.
The New York Times declared the Mundaneum “perfect in its conception”. Others were more sceptical of this intellectual Xanadu. It “is an illusion, a vain wish, a utopia”, sniped Czech critic Karel Teige in 1929. Le Corbusier was nonplussed by Teige’s charge of vanity and at the impracticalities pointed out in his structure. “Don’t confuse my trade as an architect with those whose work it is to install heating, furnish materials, linoleum, or plumbing fixtures,” he sniffed. But Teige’s sharpest criticism, that the Mundaneum had no serious constituency nor chance of being funded, proved all too true.
While Otlet waited in vain for the longed-for Mundaneum, his card library continued to grow. By April 1934 there were a staggering 15,646,346 cards, covering everything from hunting dogs to Belgian finance. The collection also included photographs, microforms and newspapers. What it had not acquired was a better home. Instead, Otlet had to repeatedly move his collection, spending one dismal stint in a parking garage, before closing it to the public in 1934.
“By April 1934 there were a staggering 15,646,346 cards”
Ironically, the project ground to a halt just as Otlet published his magnum opus, Traite de Documentation. In it, he conjured up a new role for his card library. Instead of a central library-city, he now proposed a system of remote access, with communication by telephone and viewing via a TV screen. Librarians would still play their part, fetching the cards from an immense storehouse and then arranging them for remote viewing.
“Cinema, phonograph, radio, television… have in fact become the new book,” Otlet declared. He saw a time when radio, telephone and facsimile technologies would enable this desktop “electric telescope” to send and receive requests and commentary; hinged multiple desktop surfaces would allow the user to glide from one document to the next as they annotated, linked ideas and responded to other users. “From his armchair, everyone will hear, see, participate, will even be able to applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus, add his cries of participation to those of all others.”
Alas, world war doomed the would-be world library. Nazi troops requisitioned Otlet’s storage space and destroyed 63 tonnes of material. After his death in 1944, the remnants of the collection slowly mouldered in an old anatomy building at the Free University of Brussels. When library student Boyd Rayward went in search of the collection in 1968, he found its accommodation rather eccentric. “They still had the old lift used to bring up cadavers from the ground floor to the operating theatre,” says Rayward, now professor emeritus at the University of Illinois.
Emerging from the ghoulish lift, Rayward found Otlet’s old office just as he had left it. “The building was freezing cold,” Rayward recalls. “Panes of glass were broken and pigeons flew in. So the piles of books and documents were covered in these… layers. It was like an archaeological dig.” Rayward feared he was seeing the collection’s final days. After further moves, immense portions of the collection were indeed trashed: 70 tonnes in 1970, 23 tonnes more in 1980 and another six skip-loads in 1993. The 6 kilometres of remaining files, now in Mons, are but a shadow of the Mundaneum dream.
Otlet’s efforts were not all for naught. His modifications to the Dewey system resulted in universal decimal classification, which remains in use today, and his ideas presaged such proto-internet systems as in 1937, in 1945, and the OCLC worldwide library online catalogue now relied upon by millions.
Today the Mundaneum’s remaining cabinets are arranged in symbolic disarray in a former department store to tell the story of Otlet’s dream and its destruction. Even the surviving files present a nearly unmanageable hoard of information. “Otlet kept absolutely everything, every little scribble,” says Rayward. “Sorting through it will take generations of scholars.”
