Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext

“The paper discusses Otlet’s concept of the Office of Documentation and, as examples of an approach to actual hypertext systems, several special Offices of Documentation set up in the International Office of Bibliography. In his Traité de Documentation of 1934, one of the first systematic treatises on what today we would call information science, Otlet speculated imaginatively about online communications, text-voice conversion and what is needed in computer work stations, though of course he does not use this terminology.” (W. Boyd RaywardThe Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

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