A familiar historical touchpoint for US scholars of the Web is Vannevar Bush’s Memex. Perhaps less well-known is the Mundaneum, in Belgium—a “paper Google.”

Otlet and La Fontaine published their scheme in 1904 as the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). It divides all knowledge into nine categories (with a tenth held open for expansion) such as “Linguistics, Literature” and “Mathematics, Natural Sciences,” further broken down into 70,000 subdivisions. These make it possible to classify bibliographic and library materials to a level of fine detail. Updated and translated into 50 languages, the UDC is widely used today in 130 countries.

The UDC offered a grand vision: a center that held all the world’s information in organized and accessible form. In 1910, Otlet and La Fontaine proposed to establish such a “city of knowledge,” which they called the Mundaneum.

…

But Otlet’s true conceptual breakthrough came in his Traité de documentation (1934), which presented “the radiated library and the televised book,” a novel scheme for remote access to data with minimal use of hard copy. As described in histories of the Mundaneum and in the documentary film The Man Who Wanted to Classify the World, Otlet proposed a global “réseau” or network of “electric telescopes.” These early workstations were to be linked to the Mundaneum by telephone and the new technology of television. A user would phone in a query, and the answer in a book or other source would appear displayed on a personal screen, which could be split to show multiple results. The network would support audio output, too, and in a final, startlingly predictive touch, Otlet’s system would also enable data sharing and social interactions among its users.

(“The Internet Before the Internet: Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum“)