From The Generalist Academy:
In 1896 Paul Otlet set up a bibliographic query service by mail: a 19th century search engine.
This is the 900th post on this site. Every time I hit a new century I like to write a bit about the nature and history of knowledge itself. For example, a hundred posts ago I wrote about Universal Decimal Classification, an attempt to systematically label and organise all human knowledge. Well, that classification was the head of a much more ambitious endeavour, and today I’d like to explore it a little more.
The end of the 19th century was awash with the written word: books, monographs, and publications of all kinds. It was fiendishly difficult to find what you wanted in that mess. Bibliographies – compilations of references on a specific subject – were the maps to this vast informational territory. But they were expensive and time-consuming to compile.
Paul Otlet had a passion for information. More precisely, he had a passion for organising information. He and Henri La Fontaine made bibliographies on many subjects – and then turned their efforts towards creating something better. A master bibliography. A bibliography to rule them all, nothing less than a complete record of everything that had ever been published on every topic. This was their plan: the grandly named Universal Bibliographic Repertory....
....MUCH MORE
I admit it. I get a bit obsessive with information storage and retrieval. As noted in an April 2020 post:
This is a couple months old but if I don't post it now it may not re-emerge from the link-vault in my lifetime.
(filing systems: very important you remember how things were indexed and cross-indexed)*
*You may think of your filing system as a thing of beauty:
When it has actually morphed, without your noticing, into something like this:
And today's story from Places Journal, May 2021:....
Ye Olde Artisanal Information Retrieval Algorithm Shoppe
And many more. If interested (and who wouldn't be?) use the 'search blog' box. upper left.
