Mundaneum Museum

In 1985, Belgian academic André Canonne raised the possibility of recreating the Mundaneum (a world center of information) as an archive and museum devoted to Paul Otlet, father of Information Science, and others associated with them. Cannone, with substantial help from others, eventually managed to open the new Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium in 1998. This museum is still in operation, and contains the personal papers of Otlet and La Fontaine and the archives of the various organizations they created along with other collections important to the modern history of Belgium.

Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine aimed to gather together all the world''s knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification.

Otlet regarded the project as the centerpiece of a new ''world city'' - a centrepiece which eventually became an archive with more than 12 million index cards and documents. These index cards refered to each other as an analogue hyperlink.

Some consider it a forerunner of the internet and Otlet himself had dreams that one day, somehow, all the information he collected could be accessed by people from the comfort of their own homes. The Mundaneum was originally housed at the Palais du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. The Mundaneum has since been relocated to a converted 1930s department store, here in Mons.

Otlet commissioned architect Le Corbusier to design a Mundaneum project to be built in Geneva, Switzerland in 1929, but it was never realized.

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