The Mundaneum in Belgium Where Information Technology meets its Archaeology

Today the Mundaneu m in Belgium is an archives center and a museum. But the origins of the Mundaneum go back to the late nineteenth century. Created in 1895 in Brussels by two Belgian jurists, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), the father of documentation, and Henri La Fontaine (1854-1943), Nobel Peace Prize in 1913, the project aimed at gathering the entire world's knowledge to file it using the Universal Decimal Classification system that they had created. Today their work is interpreted as the first paper search engine in history, a prow-hypertext. The cultural project of the institution now located in Mons, European Capital of Culture in 2015, is both aimed at highlighting the heritage and questioning the future of access to knowledge.