Courtesy of W. B. Rayward:
Prof. W. Boyd Rayward and
Prof. Eugene Garfield have endowed a
lectureship named for
Paul Otlet Lecture at
University of Illinois. The
first lecture entitled "
When Was the Age of Information?" will be
delivered by
Prof. Paul Duguid from School of Information
at the University of California, Berkeley) on 5. May 2014.
About the Otlet Lecture:
Paul Otlet (1868-1944), a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer,
internationalist, and pacifist, became concerned as a young man about
the increasing volume and fragmentation of the literature of science and
scholarship. With his colleague,
Henri la Fontaine, winner
of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, he spent his life in building
experimental “knowledge” institutions that he hoped might facilitate
global access to information in a range of new formats. His analyses of
what he called documentation, of multimedia substitutes
for the book, of encyclopedias, museums and libraries led him to
explore the possible use of the new technologies of his days such as
x-rays, radio, telegraphy, cinema, sound recording and eventually
television for disseminating information through a universal
information network. And he proposed special organisational
arrangements for the network’s management and use by means of what he
called Mundaneums. He also envisaged the development of a range of new
kinds of intellectual machines and instruments that, suggested
by what was already available, would create new functionalities in
information access and use. In these ideas we find foreshadowings of the
digital and other technologies that have created such phenomena as the
Internet, the World Wide Web, Google and even—and
perhaps especially—Wikipedia, that are fundamental to what we now
regard as a new kind of information society.
