Mundaneum

The Mundaneum is a historic information repository conceived by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in 1895 in Brussels. It arose from the documentation movement, aiming to collect and organize all human knowledge in a single reference system. Central to the project were the Universal Decimal Classification and a vast card catalog designed to index books, articles, and other materials.

The Mundaneum was envisioned as a universal knowledge network, a "world brain" or "world city" that would be accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public. It amassed millions of index cards and documents and functioned as both library and research center before global upheavals.

World War II and subsequent changes disrupted the original operations. In the late 20th century the collection was revived in Mons, Belgium, where the Mundaneum has operated as a museum, archive, and cultural center dedicated to the history of documentation and information science, with ongoing digitization efforts.

Legacy: The Mundaneum is widely cited as an early precursor of modern information science and as an influence on later ideas about global information networks and digital knowledge organization.