The Mundaneum and pre-internet Information Architecture
📕 Background
In 1910, Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine created ‘The Mundaneum’ — an institution whose goal was to gather and classify all the world’s knowledge to make it widely and easily accessible. The pair established the International Institute of Bibliography that went on to create and disseminate a catalog and classification system called the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) which remains in widespread use to this day.
Under the UDC, the sum of human knowledge is divided into nine categories (with an additional unused but still marked category) and further into 70,000 sub-categories. Built on the back of the Dewey-Decimal system, the syntax-based notation of the UDC organizes information in a logical hierarchical, analytico-synthetic manner which allows for new knowledge to be easily incorporated.
🔑 How does it work?
As a brief example provided by Salam Y’all, if a new scientific publication concerning the metabolism of polar bears in the month of February were published tomorrow, you would combine the classification for polar bear “599.744.212” (your main number) to the special auxiliary number for metabolism “57.017.7" (a specific but re-useable attribute in a field of study) and the common auxiliary number for time “327.502” to create a UDC classification of 500.744.202.017.7"327.502". Due to the syntactical structure, you can continue adding different auxiliary tables (perhaps your polar bears were in both Manitoba and Nunavut?) as necessary.
🏙️ The City of Knowledge and Beyond
From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate the whole of creation, in whole or in certain parts. — Paul Otlet
Not only did Otlet and La Fontaine propose this classification system, but they took it one step further: a “city of knowledge” which would be the center of this system, and a place where every book ever published would be catalogued. The innovation didn’t end at “simply” cataloguing, Otlet continued to imagine how people could access the Mundaneum without setting foot in the building. As I sit here with 2 screens and multiple browser tabs open in front of me, his proposed network of “electric telescopes,” which was to be a system where users would call in a request to the Mundaneum and the source would be displayed on a personal screen feels rather innovative and is a reminder that the job of classification doesn’t end in the sorting.
