Facts and frameworks in Paul Otlet's and Julius Otto Kaiser's theories of knowledge organization

T he late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed numerous developments in the domain of classificatory and indexing activities known today as knowledge organization (KO). Among the most striking of these was the emergence of the idea that documents could be decomposed not only into smaller bibliographical units (as, for example, a periodical into articles or a book into chapters), but also into yet smaller information units (such as, for example, the concepts or facts discussed in discrete passages within a text) and that, once identified, these information units could be reconfigured in new arrangements that would facilitate their retrieval [1, p. 223; 2, pp. 221–222]. This idea, which I term information analysis, would have a long and influential career in information science (IS) and continues to influence IS theory and practice to this day [see sidebar]. The notion of information analysis may be traced back to two pioneers Belgian Otlet occupies a prominent place in the history of IS. A lawyer by training and a bibliographer by vocation, he made a number of fundamental contributions, both theoretical and practical, to the development of IS. Originator of the European documentalist movement, initiator or charter member of a number of organizations devoted to international cooperation in bibliography and (co-)creator of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), he developed a comprehensive vision of how information was to be organized and mobilized that prefigured, in many respects, the hypertextual systems that are in vogue today [3]. Kaiser, by contrast, holds a somewhat lower profile in the annals of IS. Born in Germany but spending most of his life in Great Britain and the The idea that documents can be decomposed into smaller information units to which direct access might be provided has been historically influential in IS theory and practice, as the following three examples indicate: I In the first half of the 20th century information analysis served as a theoretical fracturepoint in the professional cleavage between general librarianship and documentation/special librarianship. Whereas general librarians focused on providing subject access to books by means of subject headings that characterized the contents of the document as a whole, documentalists and special librarians sought to provide intellectual access to specific information within documents through detailed indexing of all pertinent information units that they contained. Information analysis thus became a professional marker of documentation and special librarianship. I In the 1950s and 1960s, information retrieval (IR) theorists …