Fade Into Oblivion
Otlet died in 1944, soon before the end of World War II, having seen his major project, the Mundaneum, shuttered, and having lost all his funding sources.
According to Otlet scholar W. Boyd Rayward, "the First World War marked the end of the intellectual as well as sociopolitical era in which Otlet had functioned hitherto with remarkable success," after which Otlet began to lose the support of both the Belgian government and the academic community, and his ideas began to seem "grandiose, unfocused and passe."
In the wake of World War II, the contributions of Otlet to the field of information science were lost sight of in the rising popularity of the ideas of American information scientists such as Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson and by such theorists of information organization as Seymour Lubetzky.
Read more about this topic: Paul Otlet
Famous quotes containing the words fade and/or oblivion:
“I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth,
When time is old and hath forgot itself,
When waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy,
And blind oblivion swallowed cities up,
And mighty states characterless are grated
To dusty nothing, yet let memory
From false to false among false maids in love
Upbraid my falsehood.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)