Did you know that the idea of accessing information instantly was born long before the invention of computers?

It did not originate from an American tech company, but from two Belgian visionaries: Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. Their ambition was immense: to gather and organise the entirety of human knowledge.

To achieve this, they devised a system for the systematic indexing of publications from across the globe. Every piece of information was recorded on a card index containing the title, author, subject, and keywords. These millions of cards were then categorised using the Universal Decimal Classification, a true compass of knowledge enabling the most diverse subjects to be linked together.

This project, often described as a "Paper Google", was based on a simple yet revolutionary idea: knowledge is only valuable if it can be organised and retrieved easily. Long before the Internet, Otlet and La Fontaine had understood that the challenge was not merely to produce information, but to be able to search for, link, and share it.

This visionary intuition was recognised much later by the digital world. Google itself has paid tribute to Paul Otlet, who is considered by many as one of the pioneers of modern information management and, in a sense, of search engines.

To this day, this monumental project is preserved at the Mundaneum (mundaneum.org) in Mons in Belgium, where it stands as a testament to this extraordinary ambition: organising the world's knowledge long before the Internet era.