Michael Buckland's Paul Otlet homepage

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/otlet.html

...born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1868. His monumental book Traité de documentation. (Brussels, 1934) was both central and symbolic in the development of information science - then called "Documentation" - in the first half of this century. In addition, it reminds us of something that has been too widely forgotten: That this field did have a lively existence in the early decades of this century and a sophistication concerning theory and information technology that now commonly surprises people.