The Mundaneum and the digital culture

Abstract

The author appreciates first of all the works of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, and then he reminds the reader of the International Bibliographic Institute (1895) and of the worid library experiment, the Mundaneum (1920). This latter has failed because at that time the telecommunication technology capable to disseminate the results of the Institute's collecting and processing efforts was nonexistent. Today this requirement is fulfilled at a growing pace by a virtual library, the internet.