International Centre, Brussels

International Centre, Brussels

By organising the world’s knowledge, international organisations sought to offer an independent alternative to national archives, libraries and classification systems. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine’s International Centre in Brussels was a key coordinating centre, it included the International Institute of Bibliography (famed for pioneering the Universal Decimal Classification system) and International Museum. The former contained of more than 12 million index cards systematically arranged into all branches of knowledge, and the museum consisted of dozens of rooms dedicated to new international technologies (e.g. the telegraph and aviation), international sciences (e.g. economics, geography and geology), and various countries and world regions.