Index Card Internet

[Crow of Ryuzoji]

When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on neatly organized 3″ x 5″ index cards. The brainchild of Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine, the vast project eventually totaled 12 million cards, each classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet.

Le Corbusier was one of many prominent figures enthralled by Otlet’s scheme of a “Universal Book.” He described it as a panorama of “the whole of human history from its origins,” and signed on to design an international “city of the intellect,” centered around the Mundaneum.

In 1919, the Belgian government turned over 150 rooms in the Palais du Cinquantenaire to serve as a home for the Mundaneum, but five years later revoked the space to use it for a temporary exhibit on the nation’s rubber industry. The Mundaneum moved into a series of smaller spaces, and eventually took over a parking garage before closing for good in 1934, the same year that Otlet published his magnum opus Traité de documentation. Though Otlet’s name is little remembered today outside the field of information science, he deserves credit for developing many of the ideas behind the modern Internet. What’s left of the Mundaneum persists in a museum in Mons, Belgium. From Boxes and Arrows:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

    In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the Memex, decades before Ted Nelson coined the term “hypertext,” Paul Otlet envisioned a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read and write their way through a vast mechanical database stored on millions of 3×5 index cards.

    This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would also let them annotate the relationships between one another, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

    Otlet imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an “electric telescope” connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen.

    In Otlet’s time, this notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe these relationships, until he invented one: “links.”

    Otlet envisioned the whole endeavor as a great “réseau” — web — of human knowledge.

[JingleJoe]

Wow, who knew the first person to conceive the æthernet was victorian
That was mighty interesting, and I usually don't like reading more than a paragraph or so for forum topics, but I read and enjoyed all of that

[Crow of Ryuzoji]

I'm glad that someone has enjoyed one of my informational ramblings that I'm prone to these days.

[Cheery Rayne]

In my opinion, you can ramble all you want. I now appoint you Head Keeper of Arcane Knowledge, continue your work with pride.

[Smaggers]

Wow, what a visionary, that's an amazing story.

[IvanDrugostrov]

Do you have any further, more detailed information on this? Such as how much text could be stored on each card and a summary how it was all classified (what classes and subclasses there were. Must have been a great deal)?

[Crow of Ryuzoji]

In my opinion, you can ramble all you want. I now appoint you Head Keeper of Arcane Knowledge, continue your work with pride.

I proudly accept said title sir.

[Crow of Ryuzoji]

Do you have any further, more detailed information on this? Such as how much text could be stored on each card and a summary how it was all classified (what classes and subclasses there were. Must have been a great deal)?

Unfortunately I do not know how much text could be stored on one card. However, the cards were filed in custom-designed cabinets according to an ever-expanding ontology, an indexing staff which culled information worldwide from as diverse sources as possible, and a commercial information retrieval service which answered written requests by copying relevant information from index cards. Users of this service were even warned if their query was likely to produce more than 50 results per search. The Table of Contents of Paul Otlet's Permanent Encyclopedia grew from 400,000 entries in 1895 to over 15 million in 1934.

The cards were filed using the Universal Decimal Classification, based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, but uses auxiliary signs to indicate various special aspects of a subject and relationships between subjects. UDC classifications use Arabic numeral system and are based on the decimal system. Every number is thought of as a decimal fraction with the initial decimal point omitted, which determines filing order. For ease of reading, a UDC identifier is usually punctuated after every third digit. Thus, after 61 "Medical sciences" come the subdivisions 611 to 619; under 611 "Anatomy" come its subdivisions 611.1 to 611.9; under 611.1 come all of its subdivisions before 611.2 occurs, and so on; after 619 comes 620. An advantage of this system is that it is infinitely extensible, and when new subdivisions are introduced, they need not disturb the existing allocation of numbers.

The main categories:

    * 0 generalities
    * 1 philosophy, psychology
    * 2 religion, theology
    * 3 social sciences
    * 4 vacant
    * 5 natural sciences
    * 6 technology
    * 7 the arts
    * 8 language, linguistics, literature
    * 9 geography, biography, history

A document may be classified under a combination of different categories through the use of additional symbols. For example:

+  addition     e.g. 59+636 zoology and animal breeding
/  extension   e.g. 592/599 Systematic zoology (everything from 592 to 599 inclusive)
:  relation     e.g. 17:7 Relation of ethics to art
[] algebraic subgrouping     e.g. 31:[622+669](485) statistics of mining and metallurgy in Sweden (the auxiliary qualifies 622+669 considered as a unit)
=  language    e.g.  =20 in English; 59=20 Zoology, in English

More in-depth information on this system can be found here: http://www.udcc.org/

[James Harrison]

It rather reminds me of a similar organisation described in H G Wells' "A Modern Utopia". 

[HildeKitten]

I knew Belgian was good for something

[DonQuijote]

magnificent..... i might adapt such systme for my optic disk database..... *grumble*....

[Cheery Rayne]

Not sir, Ma'am.

[clockwerkman]

My brother the Archivist would squee to see this! 

[Crow of Ryuzoji]

Not sir, Ma'am.

Oops, my apologies. Must work on correcting that habit of calling everyone 'sir'.

[Luella Dobson]

that's incredible! it's funny how many things we consider to be "new" are actually old things, simply built and improved upon.

[S.Sprocket]

if only all of the millions of cards were still around, it would make an interesting webpage to put his dream into reality.  Scan them all have them searchable by his means...

[Dr von Zarkov]

Today's New York Times visits the Mundaneum in an article, The Web Time Forgot.

[Luella Dobson]

if only all of the millions of cards were still around, it would make an interesting webpage to put his dream into reality.  Scan them all have them searchable by his means...

ah! If only!