Mundaneum
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The Mundaneum is a non profit organisation based in Mons, Belgium that runs an exhibition space, website and archive which celebrate the legacy of the original Mundaneum established by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in the early twentieth century.[1]
History
The Mundaneum was originally created in 1910, following an initiative begun in 1895 by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine,[2] as part of their work on documentation science. It aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification. Otlet and La Fontaine organized an International Conference of International Associations which was the origin of the Union of International Associations (UIA).
The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management,[3] and (somewhat more tenuously) as a precursor to the internet.[4]
Otlet regarded the project as the centrepiece of a new 'world city'—a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents. Some consider it a forerunner of the Internet (or, perhaps more appropriately, of systematic knowledge projects such as Wikipedia and WolframAlpha) and Otlet himself had dreams that one day, somehow, all the information he collected could be accessed by people from the comfort of their own homes.
An English pamphlet published in 1914 described it:
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The International Centre organises collections of world-wide importance. These collections are the International Museum, the International Library, the International Bibliographic Catalogue and the Universal Documentary Archives. These collections are conceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects. Established according to standardised methods, they are formed by assembling cooperative everything that the participating associations may gather or classify. Closely consolidated and coordinated in all of their parts and enriched by duplicates of all private works wherever undertaken, these collections will tend progressively to constitute a permanent and complete representation of the entire world (Union of International Associations, 1914, p. 116).[5]
The Mundaneum was originally housed at the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels (Belgium). Otlet commissioned architect Le Corbusier to design a Mundaneum project to be built in Geneva, Switzerland in 1929. Although never built, the project triggered The Mundaneum Affair, a theoretical argument between Corbusier and Czech critic and architect Karel Teige.
When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, the Mundaneum was replaced with an exhibit of Third Reich art, and some material was lost.[2]
The Mundaneum was reconstituted in a large but decrepit building in Leopold Park. It remained there until it was forced to move again in 1972.
The Mundaneum has since been relocated to a converted 1930s department store in Mons (Wallonia), where the existing museum opened in 1998.[2]
See also
- As We May Think, an essay by Vannevar Bush
- Documentation science
- Memex, a portmanteau given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system
- MyLifeBits
- Project Xanadu, the first hypertext system, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson
- People
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Vannevar Bush
- Douglas Engelbart
- J.C.R. Licklider
- Ted Nelson
- Paul Otlet, considered one of the fathers of information science, helped establish the Mundaneum and created the Universal Decimal Classification
- Andries van Dam
- Ideas
- External memory
- Hypermedia
- Hypertext
- Intelligence amplification
- Office of the future
- Victorian Internet, term coined to describe advanced 19th-century telecommunications technologies such as the telegraph
- World Wide Web
References
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Additional sources
- Rayward's Otlet Page: Paul Otlet and Documentation
- World of Learning and a Virtual Library Barry James, International Herald Tribune, June 27, 1998.
- The Web that time forgot Alex Wright, The New York Times, June 17, 2008.
- Architectures of Global Knowledge: The Mundaneum and the World Wide Web Charles van den Heuvel, Destination Library 15, 2008.
- Long Before the Internet: The Mundaneum, Cerebral Boinkfest website, January 19, 2011, retrieved from cerebralboinkfest.blogspot.ca on October 23, 2012: a weblog page outlining the Mundaneum's history.
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to [[commons:Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).|Lua error in Module:WikidataIB at line 506: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).]]. |
- Official website (English)
- Official website (French)
- Commons category link from Wikidata
- Official website not in Wikidata
- Articles with French-language external links
- Archives in Belgium
- Museums in Hainaut (province)
- Culture in Mons
- Classification systems
- Science studies
- History of the Internet
- History of computing
- History of human–computer interaction
- Multimodal interaction
- Literary museums
- Belgian inventions