B004R9Q09U EBOK (28 page)

The so-called documentalist movement marked the beginnings of a trend that would unfold over the coming century. Library workers were recasting their traditional responsibilities to take on a more active role in the production of intellectual capital. They no longer saw themselves as cogs in an industrial machine like Dewey’s but instead as what we might today call “knowledge workers.” In 1910, Arthur D. Little librarian Guy E. Marion articulated this emerging vision in his article “The Library as an Adjunct to the Industrial Laboratory” in which he describes the nontraditional “specific nature of the laboratory library” as trafficking in an ever-shifting mix of “textbooks, specialists’ pamphlets, trade catalogs, reference works, maps, etc.” The mission of the special library extended beyond the acquisition of data from outside the organization, however; these libraries were also deeply involved in collecting data from inside the organization. “[T]here is a vast bulk of data which we may properly call acquired.” Internal reports, employee correspondence, laboratory test results, technical reports, and client communications all added up to “the accumulated results of the internal life of the laboratory itself. In fact, this acquired data is unquestionably for the laboratory library the most valuable part of the information.”
¹⁵

This emerging role as an information clearinghouse augured a shift of organizational focus for libraries, bringing them directly into the value chain of the industrial enterprise. The emerging special libraries were no longer passive institutions but were now active participants in the production of information. As the twentieth century progressed, innovations like microfilm and punchcards soon opened the door to new ways of working with information. On the eve of the digital age, the documentalists had started to anticipate the transformations that would soon reshape the industrial world.

In 1883 Cutter wrote a futuristic essay entitled “The Buffalo Public Library in 1983.” Imagining what a library might look like in 100 years, he envisioned readers sitting at desks equipped with “a little keyboard” through which they could connect with a central electronic
catalog, ordering books from the stacks by punching in a call number. He even foresaw networks of libraries connected by a “fonographic foil” that would enable them to communicate telegraphically, accessing each other’s collections so readily that “all the libraries in the country … are practically one library.”
¹⁶
He missed the mark by less than a decade.

So much has been written about the World Wide Web that it scarcely seems productive to try to say anything new about what may be the most documented—and self-documenting—phenomenon in human history. After less than two decades, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention already ranks with Gutenberg’s press as a technology of epochal importance. Some futurists have even suggested that the emergence of the Web signals an event of evolutionary significance for our species. While it is still much too early to divine the Web’s ultimate impact, there is no question that Tim Berners-Lee’s invention has already established itself a world-changing technology.

The Web’s astonishing ascent has also lent it an aura of historical inevitability, as if the past century’s advances in computing somehow pointed to it all along. If the theory of natural selection teaches us anything, however, it is that evolution rarely runs in a straight line. Just as the fossil record is littered with false starts, dead ends, and unexpected adaptations, so the history of human information systems is largely a story of unpredictable outcomes. Writing emerged as a form of bookkeeping, after all; it took thousands of years for people to start writing stories. At this early stage of Web history, it seems impossible to forecast its ultimate effects. We might
do well to remember, however, that throughout human history the information technologies that mattered most rarely left halcyon outcomes in their wake; for the most part, they left trails of wrenching disruption: burned-out libraries, once-civilized nations regressing into illiteracy, and episodes of blood-curdling violence. For all the populist optimism surrounding today’s Web, a happy ending is far from guaranteed.

While the Web’s long-term trajectory may be impossible to project, we can look for clues to its near future by mining its recent history. Just as the Gutenberg revolution effectively started well before Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press, so the Internet revolution is really the culmination of a series of precursor events. As far back as the 1890s, inventors were already developing new mechanical approaches to coping with a growing flood of published data. Those experiments percolated for the next several decades with occasionally promising results, but more often leading to frustrating dead ends. As the modern computer industry took shape in the years following World War II, however, computer scientists began developing new hypotheses that broke from the old physical reference points of libraries, catalogs, and indexes to map out a new kind of virtual information space that could take advantage of the emerging digital medium.

Taken together, these early networked technologies not only shed light on how the Web came to be, but they also present alluring visions of how things might have turned out differently. By exploring the history of the “Web that wasn’t,” we can find glimpses of a Web that might have been and, perhaps, clues to a Web that may yet be.

One rainy afternoon in 1968 a young Australian graduate student named Boyd Rayward stepped into an abandoned office in the Parc Leopold in Brussels, Belgium. Inside, he discovered “a cluttered, musty, cobwebbed office into which the rain leaked—and one day flooded—causing the attendant then on hand to have a kind of epileptic seizure.”
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Piled high to the ceiling were dusty stacks of books,
files, and manuscripts: the intellectual flotsam of a seemingly disorganized old scholar.

The previous occupant, Paul Otlet, had been dead for nearly 25 years. A bibliographer, pacifist, and entrepreneur, Otlet in his heyday had been feted as a great man, enjoying the company of Nobel laureates and even playing a role in the formation of the League of Nations. But by the time of his death in 1944, he had lived long enough to see his reputation fade to near-obscurity, witness the failure of his greatest ambition, and suffer the final humiliation of watching the Nazis cart away and destroy much of his life’s work. When he died a few months before the end of war, hardly anyone noticed. So ended the legacy of the Internet’s forgotten forefather.

In 1934, years before Vannevar Bush dreamed of the Memex and decades before Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson pioneered the possibility of hypertext information retrieval, Otlet had already delivered a stunningly prescient prophesy of a new kind of networked, multimedia-rich information space:

Otlet imagined a day when users would access databases of recorded information from great distances by means of an “electric telescope,” retrieving facsimile images to be projected remotely on a flat screen. At the center of this electronic nexus, Otlet imagined a new kind of scholar’s workstation: a moving desk shaped like a wheel, powered by a network of hinged spokes beneath a series of moving surfaces. The machine would let users search, read, and write their way through a vast mechanical database. This new research environment would do more than just let users retrieve documents; it would
also let them annotate the relationships between them, “the connections each [document] has with all other [documents], forming from them what might be called the Universal Book.”

Otlet’s vision rested not just on communications technology but on brilliant insights into the possibility of stitching otherwise discrete bits of information together, creating semantic relationships that would allow users to navigate from one resource to another across an electronic network. In 1934 the notion of networked documents was still so novel that no one had a word to describe such relationships, until Otlet invented one: “links.” He envisioned the whole endeavor as a great “
réseau
”: a web.

Otlet’s idea relied on a new classification framework that, he believed, could succeed where other “universal” classifications had failed. Generations of philosophers had tried to solve the problem of universal classification—including Bacon, Diderot, and Wilkins—in the nineteenth century. The industrialization of printing, coupled with the advent of cheap binding materials, had spurred an explosion in publishing no less disruptive than the advent of Gutenberg’s press 400 years earlier. Faced with an onslaught of new texts, nineteenth-century scholars and bibliographers had wrestled again with the problem of classification. Catalogers like Panizzi, Dewey, and Ranganathan had made great headway in systematizing subject headings, laying the foundations of modern library and information science. With the profusion of printed books, the prospects for a viable universal catalog were growing dim.

In 1895 Otlet and Henri La Fontaine established the
Repertoire Bibliographique Universel
, an ambitious attempt at developing a master bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge. Otlet recognized from the beginning that the success of the project would depend on the scalability of its classification system. After evaluating the popular systems then in use, including the Dewey Decimal System and Panizzi’s scheme for the British Museum, Otlet realized that they all shared a fatal flaw: They were designed to guide readers as far as the individual book—but no further. This was an epiphany with potentially revolutionary implications.

Ranganathan had voiced the ethos of modern cataloging when
he said, “every reader his or her book, and every book its reader.” But once book and reader were matched, they were left pretty well to their own devices. Otlet wanted to go a step further. He wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the books themselves, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions” inside. Taking Dewey’s system as his starting point, Otlet began developing what came to be known as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), now widely recognized as the first—and one of the only—full implementations of a faceted classification system. While Ranganathan deserves credit as the philosophical forbearer of facets, Otlet was the first to put them to practical use. Today, the UDC comprises over 62,000 classes, and has been translated into over 30 languages (one reason for its popularity outside the United States).

 

Illustration from Otlet’s
Traité de documentation
(1934).

 

In addition to a set of Main Tables for subject headings, the UDC supports a series of Auxiliary Tables allowing for the addition of facets. These tables provide notations for place, language, and physical characteristics and for marking relationships between topics using a set of connector signs such as “+,” “/,” and “:”. The UDC’s capacity for mapping relationships between ideas—for constructing the “social space” of a document—provides a dimension of use not supported in other purely topical classification schemes. As the Universal Decimal Classification Consortium puts it:

In 1910, in the wake of the Brussels world’s fair, Otlet and La Fontaine created an installation, called
Mundaneum
, at the
Palais du Cinquantenaire
of the
Palais Mondial
. Originally envisioned as the centerpiece of a new “city of the intellect,” the
Mundaneum
was to be the hub of a utopian city that housed a society of the world’s nations. Otlet successfully lobbied the Belgian government to provide a new home for the
Mundaneum
. Not coincidentally, the Belgian government had just launched a lobbying campaign to host the nascent League of Nations’s new headquarters. Hoping to help his country take center stage in wooing the new organization, Otlet managed to secure a wing of a government building in Brussels to incubate his operation, assembling a vast “documentary edifice” that eventually comprised over 12 million individual index cards and documents. At the time the index card represented the latest advance in information storage technology: a standardized, easily manipulated vessel for housing individual nuggets of data. So, Otlet’s
réseau
began taking shape in the form of an enormous collection of index cards, arranged in a sprawling array of cabinets.