Before the World Wide Web and Wikipedia, there was the Mundaneum, an attempt in the early twentieth-century by two Belgian lawyers and documentalists, Paul Otler and Henri La Fointaine, to collect all the important knowledge of the world in one place and create a sort of international utopia of the mind that was accessible and hyperlinked. Although it was not technologically possible at the time, Otlet ambitiously outlined plans that would allow everyone in the world to see the info through “electronic telescopes,” which would also enable users to send each other messages. The facility to house the information was to be built in Switzerland by Le Corbusier, but it never came to fruition. The collection, though, would up with 12 million documents. It lives on as a museum.

In his 1994 article, “Visions of Xanadu,” W. Boyd Rayward republished a 1914 pamphlet about the fledgling knowledge-sharing organization:

The International Centre organises collections of world-wide importance. These collections are the International Museum, the International Library, the International Bibliographic Catalogue and the Universal Documentary Archives. These collections are conceived as parts of one universal body of documentation, as an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, as an enormous intellectual warehouse of books, documents, catalogues and scientific objects. Established according to standardized methods, they are formed by assembling cooperative everything that the participating associations may gather or classify. Closely consolidated and coordinated in all of their parts and enriched by duplicates of all private works wherever undertaken, these collections will tend progressively to constitute a permanent and complete representation of the entire world.•