The Archives of Paul Otlet: Between Appreciation and Rediscovery, 1944–2013

This paper outlines the life and work of Paul Otlet (1868–1944). Otlet was a founder of the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, documentation, and information science. As a result of the work he undertook with Henri La Fontaine (1854–1943)—specifically, the establishment in 1895 in Brussels of the International Institute of Bibliography, which aimed to construct a Universal Bibliographic Repertory—Otlet has become known as the father of the Internet. Otlet’s grand project, as stated in his Traité de documentation (1934), was never fully realized. Even before his death, the collections he assembled had been dismembered. After his death, the problematic conditions in which Otlet’s personal papers and the collections he had created were preserved meant that his thought and work remained largely unacknowledged. It fell to W. Boyd Rayward, who began to work on Otlet in the late 1960s, to rescue him from obscurity, publishing in 1975 a major biography of the pioneer knowledge entrepreneur and internationalist progenitor of the World Wide Web.