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He managed to create and maintain his vision of a "Mundaneum" despite the lack of technology until the Belgian government had lost interest and until Hitler's troops had marched into his very offices and commandeered the space.
I'll let his biographers write paeans about Paul Otlet and his vision.
I'm writing about something else today.
You may have noticed the music has a definitely hard edge to it today.
That's because I can almost feel the man's frustration in everything that he left behind as his legacy.
Maybe I'm projecting here but that is something I can totally relate to. (I'm not a elitist, but I'm thoroughly fed up with working for jerks, ass-holes and jack-offs. Damn. Its so hard trying to soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys.)
In addition to the 17 million index cards of information, he left behind some documents which absolutely put Dewey and his decimal system to shame.
He was a man of such drive that it took a world war to put him aside (the Reich was suspicious of him but even they didnt know whether to take him out and shoot him or if he might be of use to them since his organizational skills put even the Reich's to shame.)
He would not have prevented people from putting up their documents but he would have stopped those documents from going up without being properly cataloged.
The idea of even needing a Google to filter through the dross would have been foreign to him. (Google's main problem is that key word searching can only take us so far. Then it runs into the problem that the words people use don't mean what they say and in combinations and phrases, they sometimes mean entirely contradictory things at the same time. [Its the old "Korzybskian" semantic anomaly of "I know you think you understood what you heard/read, but what you don't seem to realize is that what I said/wrote was not what I meant".])
If its worth doing at all, its worth doing right and he would have made sure we had the tools to do it right.
The semantic web would exist already and Google searches would be that much more capable.
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