Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet

Another dreamer, Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet dreamed of a system where people could call a site on a telephone requesting information. Information Librarians would find and pull the information (stored on 3×5 cards) and send the pages, as TV signals for what he called the Televised Book, to the requester. He also suggested dividing the screen into sections to display several books.

That sounds a lot like what you are doing right now. You have requested information from my site through essentally what is the telephone system. The information is not being sent as a television signal, but it could be, during the early days of Internet we were using computers which were connected to TV sets.

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet (1868–1944) from Brussels is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science. Otlet started his work on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge in 1890s and towards the end of working life he summarized his ideas in two large books of synthesis, the Traité de documentation in 1934 and Monde: Essai d’universalisme in 1935.

His book Traité de documentation (Brussels, 1934) was both central and symbolic in the development of information science.

Otlet was the most central figure in the development of the most important technical, theoretical, and organizational aspects of the problem: How to make recorded knowledge available to those who need it. He thought deeply and wrote endlessly as he designed, developed, and initiated ambitious solutions at his Institute in Brussels.

Otlet worked alongside his colleague Henri La Fontaine, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, to achieve their ideas of a new world polity that they saw arising from the global diffusion of information and the creation of new kinds of international organization.

In his Traité de Documentation, Otlet speculated imaginatively about online communications, text-voice conversion and what is needed to further his ideas of information diffusion.