A Brief Essay on the Organization of Knowledge outside Libraries

It is a given, today, that the internet as a platform has been used to index more documents than the world’s libraries put together. Additionally, majority of the documents that were previously stored on the shelves by libraries in the past are now part of these online collections. In this paper, a brief review of early attempts at the organization of knowledge outside of the libraries based on Rayward (1994) was carried out with a view to linking the past to the present. What exactly was the motivation for the establishment of the office of publicke addresse by Samuel Hartlib and John Dury, and the information bureau suggested by Leibniz? Is there any commercial motivation behind Paul Otlet’s Mundaneum? With the understanding that the most capitalized internet service organization (Google) today is involved in reference services similar to those proposed by Hartlib, Dury, and Leibniz, is the end in sight for knowledge organization within the library? Introduction Since the inception of the written form, humans have been preoccupied with the need to preserve what is written and to make it available for reuse. This functionality has been performed in various forms even before the first set of the libraries of the ancient world. While several things have changed over the years regarding the way we live and the activities we perform as humans, the basic purpose of the library has remained intact – provision of access to the record of the past. This reference functionality is still the bedrock of the library till date. In this paper, a consideration of the knowledge organization function of the library vis-a-vis the beginning and current status of knowledge organization outside of the library is discussed with a focus on exploring the rationale behind early efforts such as those linked with Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and the likes of Paul Otlet, and those of the 21 century commercial-driven knowledge organization enhanced by the Internet. For clarity, except when the usage is otherwise explained to mean something different, the term knowledge organization is used in this paper to denote a process of organizing knowledge for use rather than referring to an establishment concerned with what may be referred to as knowledge work. Organization of knowledge in libraries It is appropriate to include albeit a short background of the organization of knowledge in the library in an article that has its focus on the organization of knowledge outside of the library. The library, as one of the leading memory institutions according to Hjerppe (1994), has been the main institution concerned with knowledge organization over the centuries. The development of the library as an institution that it is today has been linked with human civilization efforts. According to Tolzmann (2001, pp1-2), fundamental activities involving knowledge organization in the ancient times included the collection, organization, and preservation of documents recorded on cave walls and on clay tablets both of which were common media through which the experiences of the time were documented. Tolzmann wrote about a number of ancient collections discovered by archaeologists with most of them having significant number of documents that are yet to be fully transcribed.