[tt] NYT: The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web

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The Mundaneum Museum Honors the First Concept of the World Wide Web
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html
[Great graphics in the dead-tree version and probably on the site. Click 
the URL. Two people recommended this to me.

The Web Time Forgot
By ALEX WRIGHT

MONS, Belgium -- On a fog-drizzled Monday afternoon, this fading
medieval city feels like a forgotten place. Apart from the
obligatory Gothic cathedral, there is not much to see here except
for a tiny storefront museum called the Mundaneum, tucked down a
narrow street in the northeast corner of town. It feels like a
fittingly secluded home for the legacy of one of technology's lost
pioneers: Paul Otlet.

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers
(or "electric telescopes," as he called them) that would allow
people to search and browse through millions of interlinked
documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people
would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files
and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole
thing a "réseau," which might be translated as "network" -- or
arguably, "web."

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through
a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug
Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim
Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet
(pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where "anyone in his
armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation."

Although Otlet's proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog
technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless
anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today's Web. "This was a
Steampunk version of hypertext," said Kevin Kelly, former editor of
Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet's vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined
documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious
today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. "The hyperlink
is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,"
Mr. Kelly said. "It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great
inventions."

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his
native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his
lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical
misfortunes -- not least of which involved the Nazis marching into
Belgium and destroying much of his life's work.

But in recent years, a small group of researchers has begun to
resurrect Otlet's reputation, republishing some of his writing and
raising money to establish the museum and archive in Mons.

As the Mundaneum museum prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary
on Thursday, the curators are planning to release part of the
original collection onto the present-day Web. That event will not
only be a kind of posthumous vindication for Otlet, but it will also
provide an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in Web history. Was
the Mundaneum (mun-da-NAY-um) just a historical curiosity -- a
technological road not taken -- or can his vision shed useful light
on the Web as we know it?

Although Otlet spent his entire working life in the age before
computers, he possessed remarkable foresight into the possibilities
of electronic media. Paradoxically, his vision of a paperless future
stemmed from a lifelong fascination with printed books.

Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12.
His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful
entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world.
The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction
that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home
with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life
of a solitary bookworm.

When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the
library. "I could lock myself into the library and peruse the
catalog, which for me was a miracle," he later wrote. Soon after
entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.

In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library.
Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar
to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit
in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him
in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's
published knowledge.

Even in 1895, such a project marked an act of colossal intellectual
hubris. The two men set out to collect data on every book ever
published, along with a vast collection of magazine and journal
articles, photographs, posters and all kinds of ephemera -- like
pamphlets -- that libraries typically ignored. Using 3 by 5 index
cards (then the state of the art in storage technology), they went
on to create a vast paper database with more than 12 million
individual entries.

Otlet and LaFontaine eventually persuaded the Belgian government to
support their project, proposing to build a "city of knowledge" that
would bolster the government's bid to become host of the League of
Nations. The government granted them space in a government building,
where Otlet expanded the operation. He hired more staff, and
established a fee-based research service that allowed anyone in the
world to submit a query via mail or telegraph -- a kind of analog
search engine. Inquiries poured in from all over the world, more
than 1,500 a year, on topics as diverse as boomerangs and Bulgarian
finance.

As the Mundaneum evolved, it began to choke on the sheer volume of
paper. Otlet started sketching ideas for new technologies to manage
the information overload. At one point he posited a kind of
paper-based computer, rigged with wheels and spokes that would move
documents around on the surface of a desk. Eventually, however,
Otlet realized the ultimate answer involved scrapping paper
altogether.

Since there was no such thing as electronic data storage in the
1920s, Otlet had to invent it. He started writing at length about
the possibility of electronic media storage, culminating in a 1934
book, "Monde," where he laid out his vision of a "mechanical,
collective brain" that would house all the world's information, made
readily accessible over a global telecommunications network.

Tragically, just as Otlet's vision began to crystallize, the
Mundaneum fell on hard times. In 1934, the Belgian government lost
interest in the project after losing its bid for the League of
Nations headquarters. Otlet moved it to a smaller space, and after
financial struggles had to close it to the public.

A handful of staff members kept working on the project, but the
dream ended when the Nazis marched through Belgium in 1939. The
Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an
exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled
with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and
soon-to-be-forgotten man.

After Otlet's death, what survived of the original Mundaneum was
left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University
in the Parc Leopold until 1968, when a young graduate student named
W. Boyd Rayward picked up the paper trail. Having read some of
Otlet's work, he traveled to the abandoned office in Brussels, where
he discovered a mausoleumlike room full of books and mounds of paper
covered in cobwebs.

Mr. Rayward has since helped lead a resurgence of interest in
Otlet's work, a movement that eventually fueled enough interest to
prompt development of the Mundaneum museum in Mons.

Today, the new Mundaneum reveals tantalizing glimpses of a Web that
might have been. Long rows of catalog drawers hold millions of
Otlet's index cards, pointing the way into a back-room archive
brimming with books, posters, photos, newspaper clippings and all
kinds of other artifacts. A team of full-time archivists have
managed to catalog less than 10 percent of the collection.

The archive's sheer sprawl reveals both the possibilities and the
limits of Otlet's original vision. Otlet envisioned a team of
professional catalogers analyzing every piece of incoming
information, a philosophy that runs counter to the bottom-up ethos
of the Web.

"I think Otlet would have felt lost with the Internet," said his
biographer, Françoise Levie. Even with a small army of professional
librarians, the original Mundaneum could never have accommodated the
sheer volume of information produced on the Web today.

"I don't think it could have scaled up," Mr. Rayward said. "It
couldn't even scale up to meet the demands of the paper-based world
he was living in."

Those limitations notwithstanding, Otlet's version of hypertext held
a few important advantages over today's Web. For one thing, he saw a
smarter kind of hyperlink. Whereas links on the Web today serve as a
kind of mute bond between documents, Otlet envisioned links that
carried meaning by, for example, annotating if particular documents
agreed or disagreed with each other. That facility is notably
lacking in the dumb logic of modern hyperlinks.

Otlet also saw the possibilities of social networks, of letting
users "participate, applaud, give ovations, sing in the chorus."
While he very likely would have been flummoxed by the anything-goes
environment of Facebook or MySpace, Otlet saw some of the more
productive aspects of social networking -- the ability to trade
messages, participate in discussions and work together to collect
and organize documents.

Some scholars believe Otlet also foresaw something like the Semantic
Web, the emerging framework for subject-centric computing that has
been gaining traction among computer scientists like Mr.
Berners-Lee. Like the Semantic Web, the Mundaneum aspired not just
to draw static links between documents, but also to map out
conceptual relationships between facts and ideas. "The Semantic Web
is rather Otlet-ish," said Michael Buckland, a professor at the
School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

Critics of the Semantic Web say it relies too heavily on expert
programmers to create ontologies (formalized descriptions of
concepts and relationships) that will let computers exchange data
with one another more easily. The Semantic Web "may be useful, but
it is bound to fail," Dr. Buckland said, adding, "It doesn't scale
because nobody will provide enough labor to build it."

The same criticism could have been leveled against the Mundaneum.
Just as Otlet's vision required a group of trained catalogers to
classify the world's knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an
elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a
potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such
labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a
cautionary tale.

The curators of today's Mundaneum hope the museum avoids its
predecessor's fate. Although the museum has consistently managed to
secure financing, it struggles to attract visitors.

"The problem is that no one knows the story of the Mundaneum," said
the lead archivist, Stéphanie Manfroid. "People are not necessarily
excited to go see an archive. It's like, would you rather go see the
latest `Star Wars' movie, or would you rather go see a giant card
catalog?"

Striving to broaden its appeal, the museum stages regular exhibits
of posters, photographs and contemporary art. And while only a
trickle of tourists make their way to the little museum in Mons, the
town may yet find its way onto the technological history map. Later
this year, a new corporate citizen plans to open a data center on
the edge of town: Google.