Mundaneum
Archive centre and museum in Mons holding Paul Otlet's universal bibliography, a UNESCO-listed collection.
The Mundaneum preserves the archives of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, the Belgian lawyers who from 1895 set out to record every book published anywhere in the world. Their Universal Bibliographic Repertory grew to some twelve million index cards, organised by the Universal Decimal Classification they devised, and was housed for decades in Brussels before being moved to Mons. Otlet's plans for a global documentation centre have often been read as an anticipation of the hyperlinked web, which has drawn the institution international attention.
The collections came to Mons in 1993 and the museum opened in 1998 in a former Art Deco department store on Rue de Nimy, with an interior arrangement by the comics artist François Schuiten built around the surviving card catalogue cabinets. Roughly six kilometres of documents are held, including posters, press cuttings, pacifist and feminist archives. The repertory was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register and the site carries the European Heritage Label.
Highlights
- Drawers of the Universal Bibliographic Repertory of some twelve million cards
- Archives of Nobel peace laureate Henri La Fontaine and of Paul Otlet
- Interior arrangement by the comics artist François Schuiten
- UNESCO Memory of the World listing and European Heritage Label
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