Cast of Characters: Key Individuals of the Modernist European Knowledge Project

This list is not intended to be exhaustive but to suggest a pattern of ideas and activities that will stimulate further examination. Many of these figures had an association with Paul Otlet during the course of his long career. It should also be stressed that we seek general thematic papers as well as papers that relate specifically to these or other individuals.

Paul Otlet, Belgian internationalist: co-founder with Henri La Fontaine of the Institut International de Bibliographie in Brussels in 1895, the Union des Associations Internationales, the Musee International and the Palais Mondial in 1910, later called the Mundaneum; active in the movement during the First World War for the creation of a Societe des Nations (the League of Nations) and later the League of Nations Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation; author of Monde (1935) and Traite de Documentation (1934); classification and visualization of knowledge, international organization, machines for intellectual work, new approaches to libraries and museums. Henri La Fontaine, Belgian senator, Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 1913, long time president of the International Peace Bureau; one of the Belgian representatives at the Peace Conference at the end of the First World War and Belgian representative at the first General Assembly of the League of Nations; and from 1890s until his death in 1943 collaborator with Paul Otlet in the development of all aspects of the Mundaneum; Patrick Geddes, Scottish sociologist and town planner: the Outlook Tower, the Index Museum, Cities and Town Planning Exhibition, and "thinking machines"; Wilhelm Ostwald, German Chemist and Nobel Laureate: Die Brucke and the standardization, rationalization and dissemination of scientific knowledge; Hendrik Anderson, Norwegian-American sculptor resident in Rome: the World Communications Center; Herbert Haviland Field, American Zoologist: founded the Concilium Bibliographicum, 1895, in Zurich, an agency for zoological and related literatures, briefly considered after World War I as a possible center for the international organization of scientific literature by the US Academy of Sciences;

H.G. Wells, English novelist and social theorist: social evolution and World Brain (this concentrated some of the documentalist ideas of Otlet and his English colleagues- see below); Otto Neurath, Austrian philosopher, member of the Vienna Kries: new forms of museum (Vienna's Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum ), the ISOTYPE pictorial language, and the unified encyclopedia of science; LeCorbusier, French modernist architect: worked with Otlet for a World Center or Mundaneum in Geneva in 1927-8 and Antwerp 1931-2; and with Neurath in CIAM (Conges international d'Architecture moderne); Emanuel Goldberg, Russian/German Jewish photographic inventor and Managing Director of the Zeis-Ikon camera- manufacturing conglomerate: invented the microdot and a microfilm information retrieval system; Cornelis van Eesteren, City Planner for the City of Amsterdam; President of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (1930-1947 a "universal language of city planning" Ernst Neufert, author of Graphic Standards (Bauentwurfslehre) standardized graphiclanguage for architecture English and French Documentalists: Samuel Clemens Bradford, Director Science Museum Library, London and Allan Pollard, Professor of Optics in Imperial College, London, founders of the British Society for International Bibliography, E.M.R.Ditmas General Secretary of Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB) Frits Donker Duyvis, Dutch Patent Office, Sec General International Institute for Documentation; Hyppolyte Sebert, President, Association francaise pour l'avancement des sciences Jean Gerard, the Union des Orgnismes de Documentation