True Films 3.0 - Kevin Kelly

The Man Who Wanted to
Classify the World
This French film (with English and German audio tracks) is about Paul
Otlet, a Belgian Utopian little known in America. Otlet invented an
international classification scheme called Universal Decimal Classification
used for books, photographs and other documents. He invented
microfilm. He invented the ubiquitous index card catalog used in most
libraries. But as he says in the film, “I think in terms of the universal,”
and his ambitions were much larger. Otlet began organizing existing
international organizations into one grand inter-organization – the Union
of International Organizations – which inspired the League of Nations.
His one failure was to build an ultimate World City in Europe, but it was
not for a lack of trying.
But his most amazing invention (in retrospect) was his invention of hypertext,
multi-media, and the web. He didn’t use these words of course.
He called it the International Network for Universal Documentation.
By Francoise Levie
2002, 60 min.
Available from
Memento Productions
mementoproduction.be
Otlet’s early universalism was part of the reason he became forgotten
and obscure. When the Nazis invaded Belgium in WWII they were intensely
skeptical of his pacifism and internationalism. They destroyed his
archive. Because he wrote in French, and none of his major works have
yet been translated into English, his work was never part of the standard
English history of the web. This short film will help to change that.
Clerks file notes into the universal library. A half million index cards
are readied for indexing every known document (left).
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