just saw a documentation about paul otlet, "l`homme qui voulait classer le monde" from françoise levie, 2002, france - belgium at kosmopolis (hate their website)

another one who thought about a book of "universal science" and a lot more before bush. wondering if bush knew about otlet's work. i guess he must have known: he was president roosevelt's science advisor and otlet was in contact with roosevelt, because he wanted that he safes his mundaneum by "navigating the drifting boat to the usa" (more or less how they quotet him in the movie.) it was the time of the IIww.

Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson would later voice strikingly similar ideas about the notion of associative “trails” between documents. Distinguishing Otlet’s vision from the Bush-Nelson (and Berners-Lee) model is the conviction—long since fallen out of favor—in the possibility of a universal subject classification working in concert with the mutable social forces of scholarship ...(boxes and arrows

cataloge system, classification, microfilm, mundaneum, league of nations ... his biography is impressive.

another source and story on order, "world brain" and information retrieval: wilhelm ostwald

For Ostwald ordering meant concept formulation, a process of abstraction to order the material of our sense organs. A theory of order ("Ordnungswissenschaften", "Mathetik") not his energetics was the basis of his "pyramid of science" and a foundation of his philosophy of nature. Ostwald applied his ideas of order to languages, paper formats, the sciences, colours and forms.

hm, wouldn't have drawn a connection between information retrieval and taylorism, but you can find this connection - at least the text suggests that.

there was more part one