Paul Otlet - Fade Into Oblivion

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.