"The Web Time Forgot"

I meant to post this yesterday, but I forgot. (I was busy falling asleep reading If on a winter's night a traveler.)

The New York Times published an article in yesterday's science section about Belgian librarian Paul Otlet, who envisioned a global network of electric telescopes to connect people all over the world with information. Today we call that the internet. But in 1934, Otlet was trying to classify everything ever published. With index cards. (Which reminds me of my cataloging class in 2007... but that was just a bit of a time warp.)

From the article by Alex Wright:

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Wright also likens Otlet's project to the Semantic Web, in the sense that it's quite possibly overcomplicated and doomed.

It all boils down to this: Librarians are smarter than you. We know the future.