Paul Otlet

Trained in law, Otlet partnered with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Henri La Fontaine in 1895 to establish the International Institute of Bibliography in Brussels. They expanded Melvil Dewey's system into the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), indexing millions of documents across language boundaries.

At the Mundaneum in Brussels, Otlet amassed over 12 million index cards and multimedia files, envisioning an electric 'réseau' of television screens and telephone lines where people worldwide could instantly search and retrieve knowledge from their desks, anticipating hyperlinking and the Internet by six decades.