Are you interested in the Belle Époque, internationalism, and the history and archival sources of libraries, library associations, documentation and information science more generally?  Here is an update on an upcoming meeting, announced earlier, which you should not miss.

From 17 to 19 August 2023 the IFLA Library History Special Interest Group (Lib Hist SIG), in collaboration with the Ass0ciation for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is holding a preconference Satellite Meeting in Mons, Belgium, focusing on Preserving our origins: Approaches to the organization, curation, and historiography  of the record of national and international organizations in libraries, information and documentation.

This event takes place in Mons, Belgium, in the Mundaneum.

The Mundaneum is an institution set up in the last decade of the nineteenth century by two pioneers of documentation and internationalism, Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine. They are known for their role in founding the International Institute for Bibliography, which later became the International Federation for (Information and) Documentation. It was better known by its French initialism, FID. Although the FID was dissolved in 2002, it left a lasting legacy. Otlet in particular is credited with laying the conceptual basis for the discipline of documentation, a direct ancestor of information science, and creating the Universal Decimal Classification, which is still widely used today.

The Mundaneum was founded as part of a visionary scheme to harness the world’s information for international peace. It housed a project to gather and index all the world’s knowledge on millions of 3×5 inch catalogue cards, in a bibliographical tool known as the Répertoire bibliographique universel. The concept of the Répertoire was a century ahead of the technology needed to implement it, the Internet. It was, as it were, a paper-based Google. The project did not survive the Nazi occupation of Belgium. After the Second World War, what was left of the Mundaneum was moved to the city of Mons, in Wallonia, the French-speaking southern half of Belgium, where it is today a museum and archive hosting various scholarly and educational activities, in addition to preserving a large portion of the gigantic catalogue, and fascinating exhibitions.

We will be privileged to meet in the Mundaneum. For librarians, documentalists and information scientists interested in the history of their field, this is an event not to be missed. Our keynote speakers will be Alistair Black and W. Boyd Rayward, both eminent  scholars in library and information history. For more information about the meeting, see the website. The programme for the meeting is here.