Imagine a 'City of Knowledge'

Belgian Paul Otlet [Wikipedia], often considered the father of information management, had a vision in 1934 that came long before anyone else. He first envisioned a "city of knowledge" with concepts of the computer and the internet that were probably considered fantastical at the time.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call Information Science, but what he called "Documentation". A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge.

Below is a longer documentary narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, his biographer.