Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet

Paul Otlet (1868-1944) was a Belgian bibliographer, documentalist, and visionary often called "the father of the modern encyclopedia" and even a precursor to the Internet. His life's work centered on organizing the world's knowledge in a systematic, universal, and accessible way.

Together with Henri La Fontaine, he created the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), a powerful system for categorizing information across all fields of knowledge. This became the backbone of his greatest project: the Mundaneum, an enormous paper‑based encyclopedia and documentation center intended to gather and index everything ever published. At its peak, it contained millions of index cards, documents, images, and bibliographic records.

Otlet imagined a global network where people could remotely access books, images, and data, an idea strikingly similar to the modern web.