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Paul Otlet, documentation and classification

2006; Wiley; Volume: 43; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/meet.1450430173

0044-7870

Boyd Rayward, Jonathan Furner, Kathryn La Barre, Boyd Rayward, Julian Warner,

In 2002 the well-known Belgian documentary film maker, Françoise Levie, released her account of the life of Paul Otlet, The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World: From the Index Card to the World City, the Visionary Life of a Belgian Utopian, Paul Otlet (1868-1940). (65 minute video - Sofidoc Production, 46 rue Colonel Bourg, B-1030 Brussels, Belgium.) Clip of the film: www.boxesandarrows.com/files/banda/forgotten_forefather_paul_otlet/otlet_traite.wmv Her deeply researched film is at once biographical and a study of the ideas that led Otlet to conceive of the Mundaneum, a world organization dedicated to the management of the world's knowledge as the basis for a new kind of world community. She recounts not only his contacts with the famous architect Le Corbusier and the rather strange American sculptor Hendrik Anderson, who sought to establish an international communications center, but also Otlet's own speculations about new kinds of information technologies for managing and transmitting knowledge that prefigure what has now become possible with the Internet and the World Wide Web. There has been considerable interest in having this film shown at an ASIS&T meeting and it will form the centerpiece of this SIG/HFIS session on documentation and the origins of information science. A panel discussion to follow the screening will provide context and grounding for the film. Otlet coined the term "Documentation" in 1903 and his ideas about this, set forth in a voluminous body of writing that culminated in 1934 in his magisterial Traité de Documentation, which might well be considered the first text book on information science, were widely influential in Europe and not without impact in the US, at least in the period before the outbreak of World War II. Central to the new technologies Otlet proposed was the Universal Decimal Classification, originally derived with permission from Dewey's Decimal Classification but then enormously expanded and given new linguistic capabilities that made it the first great faceted classification. But it was not merely the UDC itself that intrigued the information scientists and librarians who followed Otlet, but the nature, value and role of new approaches to bibliographical and knowledge classification for transforming our understanding of information retrieval more generally that he had highlighted in his work. In the UK these ideas were embodied in S.C. Bradford's collection of essays published simply as Documentation, in 1948, the year of his death, and republished with an extensive introduction by Jesse Shera and Margaret Egan in 1953. This new interest in classification, strongly influenced by the ideas of the Indian librarian, Ranganathan, about faceted classification for which the UDC was an imperfect prototype, informed the creation of the still active Classification Research Group in the UK, the Classification Research Study Group in the US, which became SIG/CR, and the Library Circle in India. In the US, European ideas about Documentation were reflected in the creation of the American Documentation Institute in 1937. The letterhead of the ADI for a time even carried a definition of documentation derived from the European definition. Broader concerns for what documentation was and how it related to librarianship and what was soon to be called information science were the subject of several papers by Jesse Shera. And he and others, also influenced by Ranganathan, were active in creating the North American Classification Research Study Group to examine new ways of thinking about knowledge organization. At the basis of all of these endeavors were ideas of "documentation" that ultimately derive from the work of Paul Otlet and his European colleagues, though the links to these ideas have become obscured with time. In this session, the 65 minute film, "The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World: From the Index Card to the World City, the Visionary Life of a Belgian Utopian, Paul Otlet (1868-1940)." will be introduced by W. Boyd Rayward, Professor in GSLIS, University of Illinois, and Otlet's biographer, who has more recently studied Otlet's idea in relation to hypertext, the Internet and the World Wide Web. What is a document in the digital age and how have conceptions of the changing nature of documents affected our conceptions of the nature and practices associated with Information Science? What role does classification play in information organization and management? How have our views about the nature of classification changed as we have moved from print-based sources to organizing and managing digital resources? What is the relationship of the classification of knowledge and the classification of information-bearing objects, where "object" includes the digital? Is there a continuing role in information retrieval for traditional enumerative classifications, even where they have achieved a degree of faceting as in the case of the UDC? Jonathan Furner, Assistant Editor of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), OCLC, Inc., will trace the history of the unique relationship enjoyed by the UDC and the DDC, and evaluate the extent to which changing perceptions of the role of classification in information retrieval have both influenced and been influenced by the actions and interactions of the designers of these two schemes. What factors should be taken into account when conducting an assessment of the degree to which the UDC has proven to be successful? To what extent have Otlet's ambitions for universal bibliographic control been realized in the UDC? What kind of impact, for example, has the UDC's progress toward acceptance as an international standard had on the abilities of and opportunities for individuals to cooperate across national boundaries? What role did Otlet and subsequent editors of the UDC play in shaping public and professional perceptions of the utility of general classification schemes for information retrieval? Specifically, what factors have historically been the most important in shaping the set of relationships currently existing between the UDC and other general classification schemes (in particular, the DDC)? Kathryn La Barre, Assistant Professor at GSLIS, University of Illinois, will examine the ways in which these new ideas about documentation, classification and information retrieval were taken up and debated through the activities and publications of the American Classification Research Study Group which was gradually co-opted by the American Documentation Institute. She will also discuss the relation of this North American Groups to two other groups, the Classification Research Group in the UK and the Library Circle in India. In what ways were these groups informed by or did they engage with Otlet's vision? How did the activities and publications of these groups seek to advance the study of classification and information organization? What impact did the work of these groups have on contemporary research especially in the area of information retrieval and information management? What is the legacy of these early documentalist groups? Does any contemporary Information Science research seek to extend the research findings of these three groups?